












































JOY PHILOSOPHY 



By 

ELIZABETH TOWNE 







PUBLISHED BY 

THE PSYCHIC RESEARCH COMPANY 

THE HOWLAND BLOCK 
CHICAGO 








THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Copies Received 

AUG 18 1903 

Copyngnt Entry 
LbtA-n.. 12 - / if 0 3 

CLAS!> ^ XXc. No 

U a- / *7 

COPY 



\ 


COPYRIGHT, 1903 

By The Psychic Research Company 
Chicago, III. 


All rights reserved. 


REGAN PRINTING HOUSE 
CHICAGO 


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NOTICE. This work is protected by Copyright, and eimultaneous initial publication in United 
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reserved. 








CONTENTS 


I.—Introduction, . 

II.—A Good Morning in Two Worlds, 

III. —Tub Present Tense, 

IV. — A Mush or a Man—Which? 

V. —The Center of Tight, 

VI. —The Taw of Being, 

VII.— How IT Works, 

VIII.— Good Circulation, 

IX.—Tow Tiving, . 

X.— The Timitless Self, 

XI. —Ideals, . 


XII. — “I Can and i ;VflLL,” , 

XIII. —Desire the Creator, 

. > t * * % « ^ ° * 

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XIV. —Desire and Duty, < '>»*’ 



XV.— God and Devil, 

XVI.— Tet Us Play, 

XVII. —The Old-Clothes Man, 


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CHAPTER I. 


INTRODUCTION 

I know that there is, if not a “higher intelligence,” at least 
a fuller intelligence than this personal one I call my own. Many 
a time in my life I have been absolutely certain that some par¬ 
ticular thing was the only right thing,—that if it did not come 
to pass just that particular way the loss would be infinite and the 
harm deep as hell itself, and utterly irreparable. 

Well, it did not come to pass as I thought it muct in order to 
keep the earth from wobbling on its axis. 

And do you know, it wasn’t very long before I was fervently 
glad it did not come around as I thought it must and ought to. 
The way I thought utterly wrong was absolutely right and 
beneficent. 

Many a time I have had such experiences, in little things 
and big. 

I know there is a fuller intelligence than mine; and I know 
that when my intelligence goes awry from lack of far-seeing, that 
this fuller intelligence over-rules mine. I am glad to believe this 
—glad to know that when I get in a quandary there is Something 
to bring things out right in spite of me. 

And do you know—I believe this fuller intelligence is after 
all my own intelligence. It is I who am doing it all the time. 
Intelligence is not confined in bodies or brains,— no. It fills the 
universe. All this space between you and me is pure intelligence 
in which we live and move, and through which we think. But 
we are conscious only of that small portion of our intelligence 
represented by our bodies. This great sea of intelligence is 

b 


6 JOY PHILOSOPHY. 

infinitely the larger part of us, but it acts sub-consciously, or 
super-consciously. 

But it does act, and for my individual good, as well as for the 
good of all others. I am glad to be over-ruled by it. It makes 
me feel safe to know that if I make a mistake in judgment I shall 
be over-ruled by this fuller intelligence which is over us all. 

This book- is written to help awake your faith in the fuller 
intelligence which works sub-consciously in us all; and to help 
arouse within you the joy of living in consciousness with your 
Limitless Self, which is my Self, too. Health, happiness and 
success to you, my readers. Elizabeth Towne. 

Holyoke, Mass. 


CHAPTER II. 

A GOOD MORNING IN TWO WORLDS. 

Good morning! Isn’t it a glorious sunrise? Just see!— 
not alone one sun is showing its golden rim above the world’s 
edge, but ten million suns are rising upon ten million waiting 
hearts, and shadows flee to find a place of rest. Truly, a good 
morning to you of the New Thought, whose hearts have turned 
to smile straight at the sun of life. 

I AM the sun of God. Just as this dear, old green earth is 
turning its face to the sun so you and I are turning our attention 
to the I AM sun. 

'‘The worlds in which we live are two— 1 
The world I AM and the world I DO.” 

Too long have we faced the world I DO,. Too long have we 
judged ourselves and others by the dim light of what hath already 
appeared. We have been discouraged with comparing the already 
accomplished with itself. We said, “I can do no more than has 
been done; there can be nothing new under the sun.” So we 
have journeyed, and gazed, and regretted that it was all done. 
Everywhere we looked it was all done. “Every art and science 
and business is overdone,” we said, “there is no chance to Do 
anything except what Tom, Dick and Harry have already done 
to death. There is no chance here for me.” 

I AM the ideal world. Ah, that is where the sun shines and 
youth plays eternal and almighty. In the world of ideals I AM 
omnipotent, omniscient, all-pervading. In the world of Doing 
I AM lost among the many and the already-accomplished. 

I have just read a letter from one who has been for 22 years 
a bookkeeper for one firm. For 22 years he plodded mechanic¬ 
ally up one column of figures and down another, and drew his 
little salary. Now the firm has passed out with its head, and 
this man is left at 45 without a salary. He is “worn out” and 
nobody wants the remnants—I had almost said the remains. 

7 


8 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


This man is a sucked orange and is meeting the natural fate 
of such. But unlike the orange, he was a free-will offering to 
the world I DO. His young ideals were choked off and crushed 
out. He said, “A salary in the hand now is worth two fortunes 
I might develop if I followed my ideals. I think I might in time 
work into something great if I worked along another line for 
myself, but I know I can draw a salary if I work ‘for this man. 
I fear to trust ‘the world I AM/ And, anyway, life is short and 
what’s the use of trying so hard? So I’ll add up columns, draw 
my salary and eat, drink and be merry.” So his ideals for lack 
of expression went into winter quarters, and are still hibernating 
—awaiting a new incarnation in the world I DO ,. 

But it is never too late to turn to the sun I AM. One’s mus¬ 
cles may be weak and his joints stiff; his brain cells may cry out 
for a little more slumber, a few more columns and then a long 
sleep; but still one can turn over if he will. It is never too late 
to begin putting what I AM into what I DO. Even if one is 
45 and a sucked orange, with not time to accomplish much in 
this incarnation, he can at least get ready for a better start in 
the next. So it is never too late to consider and express what 
I AM—the ideal. 

Do you know that your ideals and desires are really YOU?— 
the I AM of you? Your body and your doings and even your 
education are but white caps on the surface of YOU. They are 
but an infinitely small and evanescent portion of your resources. 
They are what you have already realized of your infinite re¬ 
sources. 

The giraffe used to have a short neck. That was all he had 
expressed of himself. But his pasturage ran short and he began 
to reach up after the palm leaves. He reached and looked and 
reached again. This unwonted exercise stretched his neck until 
it is now long enough to easily reach the palm tops. So it has 
ceased to grow longer. As long as he kept reaching out his 
neck kept growing. 

What are you reaching out after? Do you see in the world 
I AM something that is worth while? Do you reach after it in 
the world I DO? Do you keep on reaching, and looking, and 
reaching again? 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


9 


Between Teachings do you retire into the world I AM for in¬ 
spiration and power for further reaching? 

This alternation from Being to Doing—from I AM to I DO 
—is the secret of power and progress and success. It is the 
sours breathing. You inhale in the world I AM; you exhale 
in the world I DO. The more easily and regularly you vibrate 
between these two the more complete is your realization of health 
and success. 

When you have that tired and unsuccessful feeling due to too 
much exhaling in the world I DO, just rise into the realm I AM 
and by imagination and affirmation pump yourself full of— 

I AM power. 

I AM wisdom. 

I AM love. 

I AM what I desire to be. 

ALL Things work together for the manifestation of what 
I AM. 

Then rise again and express your regenerated self in Doing. 

There was one man who talked back at me for that “Good 
Morning” article. I received from him an unsigned note which 
began by acquainting me with his opinion that he is “a very old 
man” and therefore entitled to assume authority and correct 
pert, little, young and conceited things like me, for the good of 
their souls; and it closed with calling my attention to a small 
attached card bearing in a little black frame this admonition: 

“Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto 
thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, 
and he shall direct thy paths ” 

In my Bible, which is well thumbed by the way, and copiously 
underlined and annotated, these lines are underscored with red 
ink. If the sender of that card had dug the verses out of his own 
Bible instead of finding them where somebody else had put them, 
his eyes might have traveled down another line where they would 
have rested upon this: 

“Be not wise in thine own eyes.” 

And he would not have found after that any clause to the 
effect that he is entitled to become wise in his own eyes when he 


10 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


shall have become “a very old man.” The “aged” do not neces¬ 
sarily “understand judgment.” 

But there! I am reminding myself of old Dir. Driver, “the 
only man who ever downed Ingersoll.” But when a man fires 
Bible verses at me I enjoy dodging ’em and firing the whole 
Bible back at him. And when a man fails to sign his name to his 
communication it takes some effort to think of him as anything 
but an impersonal sort of target that sets itself up and dares you 
to hit it. Now if there is anything I do enjoy it is hitting the 
bull’s-eye. But if I thought the bull’s-eye had any tender feel¬ 
ings to be hurt I’d fire the other way. 

But seriously, I do not mean to lay myself liable to be hit 
with that particular saying of David’s. I have lived with it, and 
tried to let it live with me, for at least 15 years. And I thought 
everybody knew that I AM is what the Bible calls God, or the 
Lord. 

When I say, I AM power, I lean to God, the only power. 
When I say, I AM wisdom, I call God. When I say, I AM 
love, I reckon myself nothing and God ALL, for God is love. 
When I say, I AM what I desire to be, I count myself as God's 
manifestation, with his desires written on my heart. The desires 
of my heart are God's desires. He worketh in me both to desire 
and to think, as well as to will and to do his good pleasure. 

When I tell you to rise into the ideal and pump yourself full 
of I AM consciousness I bid you identify yourself with God, the 
one soul of all people and things; I bid you realize your oneness 
with all power, wisdom, love; I bid you in ALL your ways and 
thoughts and desires and deeds acknowledge HIM, the One- 
Power, One-Wisdom, One-Love, as the director of your every 
way. 

When you are disturbed, unhappy, unsuccessful, agitated, you 
are breaking the connection between God and yourself, by not 
taking him into your thoughts and desires. You are counting 
him OUT. So I say, stop and pump yourself full of I AM God. 
Power and Wisdom and Love are only names of God. When¬ 
ever you reckon yourself Power or Wisdom or Love you take 
in God. When you say, I am weak, or ignorant, or unloving and 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


II 


unloved, you deny God and force him out of your thought. Or 
at least you try to. Then let him in. In all thy ways acknowl¬ 
edge him. In all thy desires acknowledge him. 

And verily he shall direct thy paths, and they shall be paths 
of peace and pleasantness and plenty. 


i 


CHAPTER III. 


THE PRESENT TENSE. 

To think or not to think—that is the question raised by differ¬ 
ent exponents of the new thought. Most of our teachers have 
been telling us that by thought we are created and by thought 
we are saved from death. But Sydney Flower says thought is 
killing us all. We are clogging up with Brain-Ash. And now 
I come to think of it, Jesus of Nazareth said, “Take NO thought.” 

Evidently thought and its results are decidedly important to 
us who mean to Live and let who will do the dying. 

But I fancy the thought advocates are not so far off as might 
appear. Truth is ever paradoxical. 

And it is her paradoxes which MAKE us think, and do it in 
spite of ourselves. Truly, it were vain to say, Stop thinking. 
It is useless to say, Forget. 

And after all comes my own little suspicion that it is not 
thinking and remembering, but the kind of thinking and remem¬ 
bering we do, which chokes us with Brain-Ash. 

The child thinks, and I suspect him of thinking harder and 
more nearly true than does the grown-up. But a child thinks new 
thoughts; or rather he thinks the same old thoughts with varia¬ 
tions. And all his thoughts are made light and bright by vivid 
and hope-full imagination. It is as if his thoughts by some 
divine alchemy of imagination are transmuted into gas or elec¬ 
tricity before his brain is stoked with them. There is no Brain- 
Ash in a child; there is only glow and white light of electricity. 

But we grown-ups are stingy with our fuel. We put out the 
alchemic fires of imagination and burn our Facts direct. 

Our consciousness is like a little bird in a wooden hogshead. 
It flies around and around, and bruises its poor little wings 
against the sides; it soars three feet and bumps its head; it falls 
three feet and—thinks. “Life is only a wooden hogshead of a 
treadmill,” it says, and willingly gives up its little ghost. 

12 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


13 


It’s my suspicion that the “slightly wooden sound” Mr. Flower 
hears when his thoughts go tap, tapping on his brain, is just the 
sound of the little bird’s wings against the hogshead. 

Now that hogshead is too small and too full of things, stiff, 
wooden things, cut and dried things—too full to be a comfortable 
cage for any bird. No wonder its poor little spirit grows dull 
and it begins to live on Brain-Ash. How can it do otherwise 
when it must continue to rehash the same things? 

That is where the Brain-Ash comes in. We go ’round and 
’round in a hogshead; we burn wooden facts instead of electric¬ 
ity ; and dien when they are reduced to Brain-Ash we burn them 
over again, many, many times. 

And all the time there is the blue open above us, and there’s 
a thin place at the top where we could easily break through and 
circle the limitless heavens of Eternal Youth. But we have for¬ 
gotten the one thing we should have remembered, that we came 
into this wooden existence by way of this soft place at the top. 
So, now, when we catch glimpses of that opening we are scared 
—it looks so large and blue and far up there, and our spirits have 
grown so weak on Brain-Ash diet that we have not the heart to 
take the flight. So we go on ’round and ’round the mulberry 
bush where the silkworms feed, and then we lie down and let 
their cousins feed on our Brain-Ash. 

And such is the life of the grown-up. 

All because we ignore if not despise that soft place at the top, 
where The Limitless peeps at us and beckons us to stretch our 
wings where wooden sounds are not, and Brain-Ash goes, whiff ! 
—into electric energy. 

It is the treadmill which kills us—the Gradgrind life—the 
grown-up life. 

The child-life—the electric life—the new life, is eternal in the 
heavens. And Imagination is the soft spot through which we 
came from heaven, and by which we may return. 

When we catch ourselves going ’round and ’round let’s bolt 
for The Limitless, and stoke up with electricity, enthusiasm; 
and let the breezes blow away the Brain-Ash. 

It is imagination which makes the chief difference between 
child thinking and grown-up rethinking. To a child every stick 


14 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


and stone is endowed with life; to the grown-up everything is 
dead. So the child’s thoughts are alive and the grown-up’s are 
dead. The child’s thoughts being alive have power to move 
him—truly, “he is full of life.” But the grown-up is full of 
death and Brain-Ash. 

Because the child’s thoughts are alive he is so interested in 
the Now that it is easy to forget the past and ignore the future. 
The grown-up’s thoughts being dead, he takes refuge from the 
stench—he seeks again the live thoughts of his youth. 

The cure of Age is interest, enthusiasm and their consequent 
activity of mind and body. 

“Assume a virtue if you have it not,” and thus re-call it. Play 
with your work. Wipe out the past, forget the future, and play. 
Live nova. Be a child now. Endow with life all things you 
touch. Permit nothing to remain cut and dried. Cut it by 
another pattern, your own brand new one. Talk to it, smile at it, 
imagine things to it, and of it. Quit being serious. “Dignity 
is a peculiar carriage invented to cover up the defects of the 
mind.” Quit covering up anything. Be a child, smiling. 

Oh, but you can’t feel so? Nobody asked you to feel it. Just 
Do it, DO it, DO IT!—and never mind feeling. Practice makes 
perfect and feeling follows. Go in to win and keep at it, until 
you are the happiest kid in the bunch. 

;jc sfc 

Mr. Flower says you cannot have youth and wisdom. He 
intimates that wisdom goes with Age. Dlearie, don’t you believe 
it. The wisdom which goes with Age is a dirty little wooden- 
hogshead counterfeit. Only in proportion as one stays young 
is he wise. Real wisdom is in The Limitless. It is in the elec¬ 
tric atmosphere which is breathed by children and fools. In the 
hogshead it is deadened by the heavy effluvia of dead things. 
All true wisdom, all poetry, all art, all invention, comes to the 
child-brain in The Limitless. Only as poets, artists, inventors 
get out of the hogshead do they find that which lives, and stirs 
the dead things within. 


CHAPTER IV. 

A MUSH OR A MAN—WHICH ? 

Man in the natural and unregenerate state is an unprincipled 
being. He is moved by every shadow of feeling. These shadows 
being cast by people, things and events without, his mental and 
physical activities represent but a conglomerate of other people. 
He is a jelly-fish, receiving for the moment the impression of any 
finger which pokes him. Whether he wants to be or not, he is 
nothing but a “mush of concession” to every passing person or 
circumstance. He is constantly affected from without . He lives 
and changes his being according to what is thrust upon him by 
other things. He has no principle for individual living, except 
that of stinging the hand which touches him. 

The fate of the unprincipled jelly-fish is ever the same. His 
own power of initiative is so primitive that he is propelled by 
every current of wind or wave. Everything stands aside for 
even the sucker, who knows where he is going. But the jelly-fish 
has no destination. His one object in life is to keep from being 
hurt, and to this end he floats with any current. He effaces him¬ 
self as much as possible to keep from being seen and eaten. And 
I suspect he is often indignant and tries to sting because he has 
succeeded in his attempt not to be noticed. But when he happens 
to be noticed by too large a fish he is gobbled up in a jiffy. If 
he escapes being eaten he is cast on the beach to lament away his 
feeble life in a too-ardent day. 

Poor little unprincipled jelly-fish! But occasionally a jelly¬ 
fish gets tired of being a more or less unwilling mush with a red 
pepper sting. He grows a shell to protect him, and becomes a 
clam. He shuts himself up with his own opinion of the selfish 
world outside. He loses his red pepper sting, but if you get too 
close to him he nips your impertinent fingers and shuts the door 
in your face. He has his opinion of you and he wants to be let 
alone. 


15 


i6 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


But after a time he gets tired of himself and his opinions— 
deadly tired. He begins to think even the jelly-fish stage of life 
is preferable to the clam’s. At least the former had a change 
once in a while, and he saw something of life. He wishes he 
were a child again—he means a jelly-fish. 

But even a clam cannot grow backward. So he becomes jl 
crawfish and goes sidewise. He evolves some ugly legs, shoulders 
his shell and his opinions and goes sidling forth to see the world 
again. Really, he is growing a glimmer of a principle to live by. 
He has builded him a shell which makes him impervious to most 
outside forces; he has grown tired of trying to enjoy himself; 
and he has actually made a start at doing something on his own 
account, uninfluenced by the without. 

Good little crawfish! He is on a fair road to growing quite 
a backbone of his own. By and by, as exercise hardens his 
muscles and stiffens his backbone and limbers his little legs he 
will discard his ugly shell and walk out straight ahead, instead 
of crawfishing. He is growing a Principle to live by—the prin¬ 
ciple of ^//-expression. He is growing Wits as well as a back¬ 
bone and well muscled legs, to take him out of harm’s way and 
to enable him to gratify his own individual desires. 

A man in the jelly-fish stage is sensitive on the outside. And 
he is so absorbed in these outer sensations that he is conscious 
of nothing within himself. His soul-center is as unsensitive as 
his circumference is sensitive. He has shrunk into himself so 
persistently that he has deadened and dammed the power which 
is meant to flow outward from his soul-center. He is therefore 
utterly unconscious of the law or principle of his own being. 

His solar plexus is a hard knot and he is so used to it that he 
does not know it. He has cringed and cowered and shrunk into 
himself until his solar center, his soul-center, is in danger of 
petrification. Life is a dull ache, and the harder the ache the 
tighter he shrinks inward. 

Poor little man, he would better brace up and be a clam; or a 
crawfish; or better still, a man with a backbone that holds him up 
straight and leaves his solar center free to expand and fill him 
with vim and gumption to stand other men’s buffets and carve a 
path of his own out into the Free Country where he can do as 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


i7 


he pleases. He would better consult his soul-center than his 
“feelings.” He would better grow sensitive on the inside and 
give his thin skin a rest. 

The principle of all being is to express, to press outward. 
The jelly-fish, the clam and the crawfish of the human race press 
inward instead of outward. If one of them by any chance does 
happen to unbend and make a move to ^'-press himself he is 
turned backward again by the first little show of an obstacle or 
,the adverse opinion of some other clam or crawfish. There is no 
principle in him—he is worked from without. He is attracted 
by this thing and repelled by that, moved back and forth and 
in and out, galvanized or paralyzed, all from outside. And he 
throws out innumerable little antennae for sensing these outside 
influences. He is so absorbed in them that he has no conscious¬ 
ness left for the soul-center within himself, where his principle 
of being is trying to manifest. His soul's influence is the last 
influence he looks for or responds to. 

Such a being is unhappy, unhealthy, unsuccessful; and he 
grows more so until he gets desperate and quits. Then he begins 
to withdraw consciousness from the outside and wake up on the 
inside. He begins to consult himself and do as he desires. 
Hitherto he has been so absorbed in outside things that he was 
unaware he had any desires on his own account. Now he begins 
to explore himself. He expands and grows sensitive on the 
inside. When he senses a little desire there he pushes out and 
acts upon it—even if he does run against a snag or two, or a 
dozen. He has got hold of one end of the principle of his own 
being and is acting upon it. Henceforth, his way is straight 
ahead, instead of crawfishy or clammy. 

Now a strange thing begins to manifest. In the old days the 
man was always getting into somebody’s way and getting hurt. 
He spent his time tacking and backing and scudding to keep from 
being hurt. But now that he has turned himself right side out 
and started ahead, he discovers everybody else hurrying to get 
out of his way, and even to help him along. Things seem to loom 
as obstacles, but lo, as he keeps straight ahead they melt away 
and he goes onward. 

In every man’s soul is a course mapped out, a chart and com- 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


18 

pass for his guidance. If he consults his own chart and follows 
it he finds there are no collisions. His course is a true orbit, 
where all intruding matter is dissipated before it reaches him. 
His atmosphere burns it up, and renders it harmless. It is the 
crawfish who in his attempt to keep out of one orbit sidles into 
another and meets the comet’s fate—disintegration and absorption. 

This is a wonderful universe—a one-verse. There is an orbit 
for every being and a being for every orbit. Every orbit is writ¬ 
ten on a heart, a soul, and may be found only by consulting that 
soul. 

Look up at the stars—just a conglomerate of bright spots. 
Surely if they moved a little there would be collisions. But look 
closer. They do move, at infinite pace, and there are no catas¬ 
trophes. There is an order among them so perfect that it takes 
long study to appreciate it. 

Now look at people—a conglomeration of wriggling worms 
of the dust. But look more closely, dearie. It will repay you, 
for human orbits are no less true than starry ones. The closer 
you get to human hearts the better you will understand their 
orbits. The closer you get to your own heart the nearer you will 
approach the hearts of others. 

The more faithfully you follow the orbit written on your heart 
the surer you are to escape disaster. 

Grow sensitive on the soul-side and know that your course is 
sure. 

In Harper's for November there is an interesting and signifi¬ 
cant article by Carl Snyder, upon “The Newest Conceptions of 
Life.” He says: “Physiology’s present answer to the old riddle 
is, very simply: Life is a series of fermentations.” 

* * * * * 

He also says there is a destructive ferment, and, likewise, a 
constructive ferment, conditions alone governing, “When starch, 
or dextrine, is submitted to fermentation by the malt enzyme, it is 
hydrolized—that is to say, split—by taking up water into one of 
the simpler sugars, glucose. But if the resulting product is not 
removed, the action soon comes to a standstill. Add more starch, 
it will begin again; but add to the quantity of sugar, and the 
reverse process is begun; the glucose is converted into starch. 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


The enzyme, then, is able to rebuild the molecule it has pulled 
apart.” 

“For every vital function, a ferment.” 

“Naturally, the very first question is, what are these ferments, 
these enzymes * * * ? That is the biochemical problem 

of the hour. * * * Their activity seems bound up rather 

with the peculiarities of their atomic structure, of their chemical 
architecture, so to speak, than with any mystery of ingredients. 
They are compounded of the simple elements of water, air and 
carbon. It is how these are put together that is so puzzling.” 

>jc jjs sfc 5|« 

Then he goes on to say: “But this close pressing of the most 
intimate secrets of life has another implication of far more in¬ 
terest to men and women of to-day * * *. It is, in brief, that 

perhaps all the processes of life are reversible—growth even; 
that under given conditions the oak might become an acorn, the 
grown-man a child, the adult organism, led back through the 
successive stages of its development to the primitive germ from 
whence it sprang.” And he gives a real illustration of the proc¬ 
ess of growing young again : “A plant-like little affair, Campan- 
ularia, living and developing normally in the water, undergoes 
an amazing transformation simply upon being brought into con¬ 
tact with some solid substance.” Then he describes the process 
by which it returns again to its original state. 

The italics in these quotations are my own. 

jfc 5js jfc 

Life is a series of ferments which may be reversed. When we 
stir up a sponge for bread we put in a little yeast and a little flour 
for it to work upon. All night long the yeast particles are busy 
separating the solid wheat particles and filling them with yeast- 
life. In the morning the entire mass is beautifully “light.” 

* * * * * 

Everywhere in creation life and light are synonymous terms. 
Even the “lightness” of bread sponge is its aliveness. 

Now, what do you do with a light sponge? You use it to 
leaven a loaf. You stir it down, and stir in more flour, and 
knead and knead it until there is a big, solid loaf—within which is 


20 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


the germ of life. Again the yeast-life works, until the whole 
mass is “light” again—until all that wheat flour you worked in 
has been separated and made light or alive. Perhaps you repeat 
the process several times, before you finally kill your bread by 
baking it. 

If you let your dough rise too long, you know what happens 
—it gets “tot) light”; the yeasty principle has nothing more to 
work upon; the loaf is now all yeast; it begins to get sour, and 
then bitter; it grows porous, gaseous; its surface becomes wrin¬ 
kled and its once round, smooth cheek falls in; it shrivels; and 
in due time, if let alone, it will dry up and blow away. 

Good, live dough is not the result of a fermentation, but of a 
series of fermentations, each arrested at the proper moment, and 
more flour added. 

Human life is like unto it. The human being who works and 
works on one line becomes sour and wrinkled. In order to make 
good human beings they should be allowed to work on one line 
until they are full of lightness, of the joy of life. Then there 
should be kneading down and a new beginning. 

Now, this is all in your mind. Fermentation is a mental 
process. The “ferments or enzymes” are the life or mind prin¬ 
ciples drawn, not from air or water or carbon, but through them. 
They are “spirit,” love, life. The “wheat flour” consists in the 
facts which are worked into your mind, and upon which your 
soul-stuff works, digesting, assimilating it. The same identical 
process takes place in a loaf of bread that takes place in your 
mind. All is life. All is mind. 

s|e * * * * 

A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump, but the moment the 
whole lump is “light” there must be another working down. 

If we do not know enough to work down our own minds 
Mother Nature does it for us. As soon as we get comfortably 
past the light point; as soon as we begin to settle and wrinkle and 
die; as soon as life grows monotonous; there is a jolting and a 
working over. We “lose” our property and our ease. We are 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


21 


detached from the sides of our environment and friends. We are 
buffeted and soundly thumped, and we find ourselves set down 
in new conditions to begin all over again. Good old Mother 
Nature has set us to rise again. 

***** 

If we are really wise and willing we go at the task with a will 
and quickly rise. Having risen once we ought to know we can 
do it again, and do it more quickly than before. You know that 
is the way with our dough—every time we knead it down it comes 
up more easily. 

Unless we are careless and put it in a cold place , it is a cold 
day when the bread won’t rise. But it would be a cold day, in¬ 
deed, when a human being couldn't rise. No matter how much 
he has been detached from, nor how much he has been worked 
down, he can rise if he will. 

That is the only difference between the loaf of bread and the 
man. The loaf of bread has to be raised in spite of itself—it has 
to be kept at just the right temperature from the outside. But a 
man has in himself the power to make his own temperature. He 
can work himself up to the rising point. 

He can shut the door of his heart against the immanent Love 
and Will of the universe—shut in and stay down in the dark. 
He can open the door of his heart to Love, the “enzyme” of all 
life, which creates its own warmth. 

The only reason a man does not open his heart"to Love and 
Will, and begin straightway to rise again, is because he does not 
yet understand that the buffetings of “fate” are no more “against” 
him than are the kneadings of the housewife against the success 
of her bread. 

Life must be a series of beginnings and workings-up. Eter¬ 
nal life must be an eternal series of workings-down and risings- 
up. A single day's life must be a series of “fermentations.” 
***** 

Notice a child. See how readily he enters into every change. 
He is worked down and even sat on, many times a day, and yet 


22 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


he rises quickly and with joy. He never passes that just-right 
point of lightness where his cheek is round and his flesh moist 
—where he can be readily detached from his surroundings. He 
never shrivels and falls in and cakes to the pan, like his elders. 
He forgets, quickly, the working-down, and enters heart and soul 
into the business of rising now. He is so absorbed in his work, 
the work of growing light , that he heeds little the workings-down 
which are but for a moment. 

Out of sight is out of mind. He forgets what others do to 
him. He lives now —he rises. 


CHAPTER V. 


THE CENTER OF LIGHT. 

In ancient days the priests of the Hebrews wore upon their 
breastplates over their hearts certain jewels called “Urim and 
Thummim,” meaning “Lights and Perfection,” by which they re¬ 
ceived answers from God. When their people were beset on 
every hand by enemies, and at their wits’ ends to know which way 
to turn, the priests turned to God. After purifying themselves 
and praying they asked God, “Shall we do thus?” and they 
watched the Urim and Thummim jewels for the answer. If the 
jewels appeared dark and opaque the answer was, No. But if 
they lighted up, as a human face lights when it hears good news, 
then the answer was, Yes. And the people grew lighter too, and 
went and did as God had indicated. 

Now, right along beside this story of ancient people I will tell 
you another—tell it just as ’twas told to me, by a woman of 
to-day, whose name you have doubtless heard. She writes: “I 
was washing my breakfast dishes one morning and the thought 
came to me that I would go and see a friend who lived several 
miles away. I finished my work and started to dress for my 
journey, when there came over me such a feeling of depression, 
or despondency, or gloom, that I was startled. I kept on get¬ 
ting ready, at the same time trying to reason away the feeling. 
But it would not go. Finally, having donned my hat and one 
glove I started for the door, when such a wave of heaviness came 
over me that I went back into my room and sat down, and I 
said ‘God, I want to know the meaning of all this.’ And the 
answer came loud, strong, firm, ‘Stay at home’ I staid, and as 
I took off my coat and hat such a feeling of lightness and relief 
came over me that I seemed to walk on air. At the time I 
supposed the voice (I call it a voice for want of a more defi¬ 
nite term) had told me to stay at home because someone was 
coming who needed my help. But no one came that day or night, 

23 


24 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


and several times the thought flitted through my mind that per¬ 
haps it was all nonsense after all, and that I might as well have 
gone. Well, the outcome was that the train I would have taken, 
had I gone, met with a fearful accident wherein many were killed 
or badly wounded. This is only one of many such experiences 
I have had.” And I could tell you still others on my own ac¬ 
count. 

The One Great Intelligence has built in every human heart 
a “Urim and Thummim,” which, as a guide, transcends any hu¬ 
man brain that ever existed, or ever will. 

In fact, every great brain is the result of enlightenment from 
this very center. 

At one’s wits’ ends there is infinite light, only waiting to be 
used. And if only one’s inward eye is single'toward this light 
his whole wits shall be full of light. 

In olden times people were too dull and material to consult 
the Light until they had groped into all sorts of trouble in the 
dark. They supposed it necessary for man to get to his ut¬ 
most extremity before the Light would shine upon his way. 
They nosed in the dust and darkness, believing that their natural 
source and habitat. Then in their hours of extreme need they 
washed off the dust and went in bare-footed to consult the center 
of Light upon the breastplate of rightness, over the heart of one 
consecrated to God. 

And they never knew that every man in the multitude car¬ 
ried a center of light in his own breast—a center which only 
needed washing off the dirt and letting out the kinks in their 
nerves and muscles to reveal a center of Light in every breast 
in that multitude—centers so light and so true that the jewels 
on the High Priest’s breastplate cast only their composite shadow. 

“There is a light that lighteneth every man that cometh into the 
world.” And it is not the light of reason , but the light that 
lighteneth reason. 

It is not located at the center of anybody’s breastplate, to be 
seen of every Tom, Dick and Harry who runs and reads. It is 
located under the center of his breastplate, at the solar center of 
his being. Here his center of Light shines out bright and clear 
when he is doing the right thing; and when he is doing the wrong, 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


25 


or unwise thing, the clouds of dull feeling roll over and darken 
his center of Light, and say No to him. 

And if he goes heedlessly on acting against the admonitions of 
his center of Light, the clouds keep piling up, and his heart sinks 
down and down under the leaden weight, and he rarely ever 
catches even a glimpse of his center of Light. He is “gloomy,” 
we say. And he grows reckless and defiant and rushes on blind¬ 
ly to “a bad end.” 

He never understood himself. He never knew that the center 
of Light within him is his most precious possession, the star alone 
which could guide him into all good. So he hid it with clouds 
of doubt, and fear, and distrust—with clouds of ignorance, of 
NON-RECOGNITION. He “paid no attention” to it. 

And so used was he to living in clouds of distrust that he 
never realized that there could be a lighter heart than his. He 
laughed loudly, and tossed off sparkling wine, and thought he 
was having a “good time.” 

Until the crash came, having obscured his center of Light, 
there was nothing but his brain to guide his actions. He made 
mistakes. Then came the crash and a standstill; and he found 
himself and his heavy heart and the dark clouds, and the bot¬ 
tom dropped out of everything. 

But in the midst of despair he found the priceless jewel—tne 
Urim and Thummim—his own center of Light. And behold, 
the crash was a Good Thing—the best business investment he 
ever made. He has through it realized the Way, the Truth, the 
Light of his own soul. Now, he will walk softly in the Light 
and there will come no more crashes. t 

I wonder if you think this is a fanciful bit of symbology. It 
is not. It is plain fact described in the plainest language I have 
at command. 

You have a light at your center, in the region called the solar 
(or light) plexus. When you feel depressed you feel the effects 
of literal clouds, caused by doubt, distrust, fear, anger, resent¬ 
ment, grief, etc. 

Back of those clouds shines the eternal Light, at your center — 
the light meant to guide you and no other, on your way. 

Shall I tell you what to do? Get still . Quit running around 


26 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


after somebody to tell you what to do. Quit thinking around and 
around in an endless circle. Quit thinking at all. Be still. 
Keep whispering “Peace” to the troubled elements of your atmos¬ 
phere. 

After a bit the winds and waves of emotion will obey you and 
subside. The clouds will roll away and your center of Light 
shine out in all its glory. Then you will know what to do. 

When you are still then you can ask, “Shall I do thus?” and 
the lighting or the darkening of your heart will give you the cor¬ 
rect answer. 

* 


CHAPTER VI. 


THE LAW OF BEING. 

“God is Love.” 

God, or love, is the law of every being. By love every being 
was created; by love he is held together; by love he grows. 

Through lack of love man is weak; through lack of love he is 
ignorant; through the waning of love he dies. 

Love is the ^-motive power of every being; the power which 
proceeds forth from the central sun of himself, giving life to his 
body and environment; just as the sun-power proceeds forth 
and gives life to the planets. As the sun is the source of life, 
light, power, in the planets, so is the soul-center the source of life, 
light, power, to the members of the human body. 

Love is soul-radiance, the only power for accomplishment. 

Love makes worlds go round; it keeps hearts throbbing and 
children growing. 

Love is wisdom. 

Love is will. 

Wisdom and will are twined, like two strands in a cable. 

Wisdom and will, twined in One, issue forth from the soul- 
center as rays from the sun. 

The soul-center of being manifests as the “solar plexus” a 
great ganglion back of the stomach; from which nerves radiate 
to even the backwoods neighborhoods of the body. The solar 
plexus is the power house of the individuals. God, or love, is the 
power. 

The brain is the central station where the individual sits and 
controls the power. He rings it off, or on, little or much, with a 
single thought. The individual at the brain controls the power 
house and all its workings, in a general way, just as Uncle Sam 
at Washington controls in a general way the power of the United 
States. 

But the individual’s brain is not the only brain he Has, any 

27 


28 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


more than Washington is the only directing center Uncle Sam 
has. Every city, little or big, is a directing center; it draws its 
own appropriation of power and uses it as it pleases— within its 
limits —which are set by the intelligence at Washington. 

Every ganglion in the body is a little brain which governs in 
a measure the use of its own appropriation of power from the 
soul-center, the solar-plexus; hut always with the consent of the 
central intelligence, the brain—the Washington, D. C., of the 
body. 

Money represents power, the w&7/-strand of love. Whenever 
a city needs more money than it can draw by its own wisdom, it 
calls on Washington to send a special appropriation. Washing¬ 
ton may pass a law enabling the needy city, or state, to draw 
more money; or it may appropriate the amount direct from the 
government source; or, when these processes are too red-tapey, it 
might make a general call to all hands to dispense with routine 
and send the money anyhow. This was what happened when 
Roosevelt called for help for the Mt. Pelee refugees. Money 
was poured in from all directions, instead of being sent through 
regular channels. 

Whenever one of the lesser brains of the body, one of the 
ganglia, records a condition of want among its cells it tries to 
draw power to overcome the difficulty. If it cannot do this on its 
own account it sets up a cry that is heard at the central station 
of consciousness and government—the brain. When that cry 
comes we say we feel pain in the region of that particular gang¬ 
lion. If we give our stomach more than it can do we hear a 
loud call for power —we feel a dull or painful sensation there. 

When that call comes it draws special attention from the seat 
of general government—the brain. 

Now, if the individual whose seat of government is in that 
brain happens to be wise enough and “strenuous” enough, he will 
do just what Roosevelt did; he will call for POWER from any 
and all directions, to relieve the want of power in the stomach. 
And he will call in perfect faith that the demands will be met 
with an overflowing abundance. 

This is the method of self-healing. 

Of course, if the individual whose seat of government is in 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


29 


that brain happens to be a weakling fraidie-cat, he will do nothing 
but groan over the conditions in his stomach; he will lament and 
ache with it, instead of bracing up and demanding power to 
change those conditions. 

Wherever the individual’s ATTENTION goes his power 
goes too. All the individual needs to do is to say the word for his 
power to pitch in and make things straight. Until he does that. 
his power stands around and waits, just as all the pocketbooks in 
the United States just waited until Roosevelt pulled himself 
together and called resolutely for money. That call set up an 
electric thrill which ran through all the little pocketbooks and set 
them to pouring out the help called for. 

When the individual takes that same positive, resolute, com¬ 
manding and full-of-faith attitude, he may ask what he will and 
it shall be done unto him. He may say the word which will 
send through his body an electric thrill of health, with a concen¬ 
tration of power in any desired spot. 

He may open up every one of those ganglionic centers of 
power and send their surplus of energy to any given point, for 
any given purpose. In his own domain he may arise a greater 
than Roosevelt. 

Every ganglion in the body is a storage battery of both wis¬ 
dom and will, drawn originally through the central battery of the 
solar plexus. 

The solar plexus draws its power from the Great Unseen. 
The intangible becomes tangible at the solar center; the hitherto 
undirected power of space and eternity here begins to be directed; 
the uncontrolled here comes under control; the unexpressed begins 
here to £„r-press. 

You can readily see that great power depends primarily upon 
a free solar plexus. Great power can never be expressed under 
a tight corset, which binds and packs the solar plexus. 

Great power, of mind.or body, can never be expressed under 
either a binding corset or binding thoughts. 

Fear thoughts are the only binding thoughts there are. Every 
little fear gives a pucker to the solar plexus, and shuts out just 
that much power. A starved and distressed body is the direct re- 


30 JOY PHILOSOPHY. 

suit of shutting off the solar radiance by fear thoughts—or 
cinches. 

Get rid of fear as fast as you can, and your expanding solar 
plexus will burst every band, mental or physical. 

The first step toward getting rid of fear is to know that your 
source of power and wisdom is the same great and limitless 
source from which all men must draw; and that your point of 
contact with this boundless supply is within you, not on the out¬ 
side of you. When you remember this you are not scared by the 
outside appearance of anything or anybody. You do not look to 
money or a “pull” for power to accomplish; you are not afraid 
the money or “pull” of another will be stronger than your pull 
on the infinite source of all things. You know that his money and 
pull came by way of his own private pull on the universal, and in¬ 
stead of growing scared and kicking and threshing around in a 
desperate attempt to grab some of the results of his pull, you 
just quietly get down to business and your oum pull on the uni¬ 
versal. 

When you look at the results of other people’s pulls on the in¬ 
finite source, comparing them with your own, you are sure to 
grow discouraged, or desperate and fearful. One reason is that 
you belittle your own results; another is that you cannot see what 
the other man FAILED to get. You see the results of his suc¬ 
cessful pulls on the infinite, but you compare them with your own 
unsuccessful attempts, instead of comparing with your successes. 
You are unfair to yourself, and you exaggerate what he has ac¬ 
complished. 

Desire governs what one draws from the uncreate. Your 
desire and his were not alike; so his outward appearances will not 
stand judgment from your standpoint. 

Let him alone and find yourself. You are unique. You can¬ 
not be compared with anything under heaven. Your 
pull on the infinite is infinite. But it’s different. 
Tend to it strictly, and see what the results are. Quit looking at 
the other fellow and generating fear thoughts—fear that he will 
get ahead of you. Look at your own ideals and desires, and 
rejoice in your own pull on the universal. 

When you remember your source, aild your different-ness, 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


3i 


you are not afraid. When you go about your own work in your 
own way you rejoice in it all, and your solar plexus expands and 
power flows in and radiates to every corner of your body and on 
out to the outermost edge of your atmosphere; and away beyond— 
who knows how far beyond? Ah, then you enjoy what you do; 
you enjoy yourself; you LOVE; you are radiating love; and love, 
you know, is God, the only power and the only wisdom. And 
the chief end of you is to enjoy God, or love, forever. 


CHAPTER VII. 


HOW IT WORKS. 

Quit looking at things and being afraid. 

Look to your ideals and desires, and remember your source 
and infinite supply. Keep dwelling mentally on your infinite sup¬ 
ply ; keep using that supply according to your ideals. Fears will 
drop away from you and power and wisdom, Lo/e, God, will 
flow into you and through you. 

Never admit a fear. Bid it get behind you. Never admit 
a “can’t/ Pull yourself together and declare “I can —I WILL.” 

Fear makes you feel paralyzed. Ignore it. Rise up and ACT, 
and you will see how little power the fear really had. Fear is but 
a paltry stage-trick hypnotist. You cannot be hypnotized if you 
refuse to look at fear. ACT and fear flees into the bottomless 
pit whence it came—into nothingness. 

Keep on acting as if you felt no fear. In due time the feel¬ 
ing of fear, the hypnotized sense, will disappear for good. You 
will smile, and your solar center will expand and let in more God¬ 
feeling, more power and wisdom, than you have ever had be¬ 
fore. 

Sometimes you may be too badly paralyzed to act as if you 
had no fear. Well, then, just breathe. You are never too par¬ 
alyzed to go out doors, or to an open window, and breathe. 

Right breathing will dissipate fear. By using the chest and 
abdominal muscles properly you can shake the kinks out of that 
paralyzed solar plexus and let in power. An influx of power 
from the Infinite will enable you to turn your back on fear and 
act as you desire to act. 

When you are anxious and afraid your breath comes in short, 
shallow gasps and you can literally feel fear clutching your— 
“heart,” you call it. You feel fear clutch your solar plexus. 

Now, take a slow, full breath, clear down to the bottom of 
your lungs, and clear out as far as the walls of your chest 


32 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


33 


will go; hold the breath as long as you can without straining; and 
then see how very slowly you can exhale. Keep your lips firm¬ 
ly closed all the time, but do not press the teeth together; and see 
you stand straight, chest out, hips back, head up, with crown high 
and chin in. 

Ah, now—after even one such breath you feel decidedly less 
paralyzed. Your solar plexus is not in quite so hard a knot, 
and there is a brighter look in your face. A good beginning. 
Now take another such breath, and yet another. Take 
a dozen of them. Now, you will find your¬ 
self decidedly less paralyzed. You can go out 
and ACT now, as if you never had a fear. Of course, your 
teeth may chatter a bit, and you may feel a trifle weak in the knees, 
but the hypnotic spell is broken, power is pouring into you from 
the Infinite, and you can ACT. Go right along and do it. Keep 
on breathing deeply and telling yourself that you can and you 
WILL. 

And you will succeed. And next time it will be much easier 
to do. 

After practice enough it will grow so easy that you will forget 
you ever had that paralyzed, hypnotized feeling of being afraid to 
do what you desire to do. You will have taught your solar 
plexus to stay open and let in power, instead of collapsing just 
at the critical moment when you needed extra power. 

Then there are other ways of taking the kinks out of your 
solar plexus and letting in the power. Any sort of physical shak¬ 
ing accompanied by “I can and I WILL” statements will help; 
especially if the shakings are repeated rhythmetically a few times. 

Take a good, full breath and stamp your foot and say “I can ” 
Then take another full breath, stamp your foot again and say “I 
WILL.” Repeat several times. 

Many a time I have freed the kinks this way after everything 
else seemed not to avail. When I used to suffer horribly from 
blues and discouragement I used to go away up in the big garret, 
where none could hear me, and rage up and down its length a 
time or two, and stamp my foot sharply and declare aloud to my¬ 
self, “fm not blue—I’m NOT—I am HAPPY; I AM happy—I 
AM; everything is just as it ought to be, and I LIKE it so—I do 


34 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


—I DO|—Fm HAPPY, I tell you—I AM!” And I'd stamp it 
down hard. And this little exercise never failed to help me. to 
relieve me from that horrible burden at my “heart”—at the solar 
plexus. I have “concentrated” and “affirmed” by the hour, all to 
no effect apparently; but five minutes of this sort of shaking 
up always freed me, and I went about my work feeling as if 
I had thrown off a nightmare and found the sunshine. Try it. 

Then, there is another way, suggested to me by Dr. Paul Ed¬ 
wards. He said whenever he is in need of refreshing, as after a long 
day’s work, he goes away and shakes himself up for ten minutes 
or so. He stands up and gets as loose and limp as possible, all 
over; and then shakes himself just as a big dog does when it 
comes out of the water. He calls it taking physical exercise with 
relaxed muscles. 

Prolonged effort reduces the power faster than it can, under 
ordinary conditions, flow through the solar plexus. All the 
nerves get into a partly collapsed condition, as if the energy had 
been sucked out of them, leaving them dry and flabby. All the 
little muscles which encase the nerves are contracted. This keeps 
the Infinite from flowing in again. So Dr. Edwards’ idea is scien¬ 
tific. He relaxes from head to foot and literally shakes the kinks 
out; and immediately he is filled again with power from the Infi¬ 
nite reservoir. 

All sorts of depressed feelings come from this depleted condi¬ 
tion of nerves; and anything which will loosen up the muscular 
contraction will remedy the condition. Sometimes a single 
thought will be dynamic enough to do it. Sometimes a single 
hour or so of right thinking will do it. If one can be perfectly 
still, body and mind , for even five minutes, the desired end will 
be accomplished. But it takes an adept, made adept by years 
of practice, to attain quickly the state of mental and physical still¬ 
ness necessary to quick recuperation from states of depression. It 
takes a real master to speak peace to himself in such a way that 
he is quickly obeyed. 

And the master attains mastery by a long series of just such 
little exercises as those I have just given you. All these little 
“physical” drills get your body into the habit of minding your 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


35 


mental commands. After you have used them long enough your 
body will obey the mental commands alone. 

“I can” and “I will” are words of power. Say them softly to 
yourself—say “I will” and note the freedom with which the 
sound leaves your lips and throat, which are never closed on the 
word. The sound pours freely forth to vibrate the ethers. Now 
say “can’t” and note the effect; the t sound can only be made by 
inhibiting the vowel sound—by cutting off the flow of sound. 
The use of these words has the same effect on the solar plexus —- 
the zw7/-words allow a free flow, of soul-power; whilst the can’t 
words shut off your soul-power. Will-words open the solar 
plexus to radiate power to all your being; whilst can’t-words 
check the flow of power—iust as your tongue checks the a-sound 
with the tight t. 

Say “will” with a will, and you can actually feel power radi¬ 
ate through your entire body; that is, if you say it freely; but il 
you say it behind gritted teeth it has nearly the same effect as 
the f-sound. The clenched teeth mean a clenched solar plexus, 
and an inhibition of soul-power. 

Muscular tension of any sort inhibits for the time being the 
free flow of soul-power; whether the tension come from clenched' 
teeth or from a tongue clenched in the £-sound. 

Speak to yourself tlje words which open up your soul-flow; 
the can and will and love and joy words. 

Use these words with all sorts of bodily exercises for shaking 
out the muscular kinks. These are the words and exercises 
which make for life, health, happiness and success. 

All desirable things are the result of letting out the soul- 
power which eternally presses for expression through you. 


CHAPTER VIII. 


GOOD CIRCULATION. 

Do you know that a plant will not grow without leaves ? And 
it will not bear fruit, and will die early, if it has too many leaves? 
The plant suckles moisture from the earth and the sun draws that 
moisture away again, through the tiny and innumerable pores of 
its leaves. So the healthy existence of a plant depends upon the 
living stream of moisture which must continually flow through 
the plant. Simply to flow into it is not enough; and when the 
stem is severed we quickly see the results of too much flowing 
out, with nothing flowing in. Death is the inevitable result of 
any continued disturbance of that steady flow of sap up from 
the earth, through the plant, and on out again into the atmos¬ 
phere. 

Of course, a sterile earth can give little sap to the plant and it 
soon dies; and the more fervently the sun kisses it and draws 
upon it the more quickly the plant expires. On the other hand, if 
the leaves are plucked, so that there are not pores enough for 
the sun to suck the sap through, the plant must die. 

But plants are wonderfully intelligent little things, and full of 
ingenious contrivances for regulating supply and demand in such 
a way as to maintain the equilibrium which means health. The 
little wild things are wiser than we tame beings, in looking out 
well for number one. The cactus grows thick, fleshy leaves 
where it stores up moisture for use in the long, hot seasons when 
supply is small and demand great. And it glazes its leaves so 
that the sun cannot draw from it all the moisture it would. Many 
plants and trees glaze the entire upper sides of their leaves, so 
that the sun may draw from the shaded side only, where he 
cannot kiss so fervently. Some trees turn only the edges of their 
leaves toward the sun. And a great many refuse to grow wide 
leaves, and the drier the soil the narrower the leaves, even in 
trees of the same family. All plants show this intelligence. 



JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


37 


We human beings are built by the same Intelligence and after 
the same manner as plants. Our healthy and continued existence 
depends upon the same law. We, too, draw our sustenance from 
the earth and give it all off again through our pores and lungs. 
To glaze our skin pores would kill us. To shut off our breath 
would kill us. In either case our giving off would be curtailed 
beyond our limit of endurance. And, of course, to cut ourselves 
entirely loose from earth (at present)—to cut off our supply 
of food and water, would end our existence. So we try to main¬ 
tain a poise of receiving and giving, to the end that we keep 
on living. Eternal life depends upon eternal poise of receiving 
and giving. It depends upon our ability to let life flow through 
us, unimpeded and freely. This is the law of being. 

Law is omnipresent. Not a crack nor cranny in all the uni¬ 
verse, in all time and space, which is not filled with Law. 
No place so tiny that the Law is crowded out. No place so 
large that the Law is dissipated into nothingness. Law is the all- 
pervading “fourth dimension” of matter, as well as of spirit. 

Two and two make four. This is Law. It works just the 
same whether it expresses through worlds or atoms, or through 
ideas only. Two worlds and two worlds are four worlds; two 
ideas and two ideas are four ideas. 

The law of perpetual flow is the law of continued existence 
of any form, whether it be “physical,” “mental” or “spiritual.” 

A physical body which refuses to give off as much as it re¬ 
ceives quickly dies; if it persists in giving off more than it re¬ 
ceives it quickly dissipates itself. A mind which refuses to re¬ 
ceive as much as it gives, soon grows weak; if it refuses 
to give it stagnates and decays. 

Do you see that the law of life is a good circulation? And 
that it works in body, mind, and money? 

A plant draws its stream of life from the earth. Man has 
loosed himself from the earth and is learning to depend less and 
less upon it as his source of supply. He is learning to live not by 
bread alone, but by the word. He is drawing his supply more 
and more fully and consciously from the unseen. 

But this does not free him from the law of good circula¬ 
tion. Plants receive carbonicide and give off oxygen. Man 


38 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


receives ogygen and gives off carbonicide. Plants receive from 
the coarser and more tangible forms of “matter” and give it out 
again in finer essence. Man does the same. 

But man has likewise thrown out roots in the Great Unseen, 
through which he receives an ever increasing portion of his sus¬ 
tenance; which is brought down and given out in coarser form 
to earth and plant. Man’s veins and arteries carry the trans¬ 
mutations of earth matter, which he invisibly gives out; while 
his nerves reverse the order, and throb with wisdom and love, 
which come down from “spirit” into “matter” and are given off 
in coarse and concrete form. 

Just as man must receive food and give out to the atmosphere, 
so he must receive from the spiritual atmosphere and give down¬ 
ward to earth. He must express wisdom and love, m-spired 
from above earth; express it in terms of earth. Thus it is true 
that 

“The worlds in which we live are two, 

The world i am and the world i do.” 

Human and divine life are One, and the individual continues 
to exist as long as there is good circulation between the ideal and 
the real. 

Some time in past ages man’s feet were simple roots, fast to 
earth. He learned by centuries of effort to pick his roots out of 
the ground and walk off on them—in search of more food. This 
is a great advantage to him. But if he should now go up in a 
balloon and stay there for some days, breaking all connections 
with earth, he would melt into thin air. 

In childhood the imagination is firmly rooted in the ideal 
world, and his feet are at the same time firmly set upon the earth. 
So he grows fast, mentally and physically, and increases in 
wisdom, love and power. 

But by and by he begins to detach himself from the ideal. 
He detaches one rootlet after another and all the other earth folks 
pat him on the back and congratulate him because he is “growing 
up” and becoming “sensible.” So he goes on detaching himself 
from the world of spirit, whilst he plants himself more firmly in 
earth. By and by he is altogether detached from heaven. He 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


39 


scoffs at such silly, childish visions of glory. He has got both 
feet loose from the ideal. 

About this time he reminds me of Pat’s horse, which up and 
died just as Pat had got him well trained to live on sawdust. 

Man dies for no reason except that he educates himself to 
live on earth instead of in heaven, with babes and idealistic fools. 

Of course, every man has a right to make his choice of asso¬ 
ciates and places. But by and by, we are all going to be wise 
enough to choose childhood and a good circulation. 


CHAPTER IX. 


LOW LIVING. 

Just as blood circulates in the arteries and veins, carrying ma¬ 
terial food to every portion of body and brain, so thought force 
circulates in the nerves, carrying spiritual fire for the transmuta¬ 
tion of matter into higher forms. 

All disease is due to the clogging either of nerves or veins, or 
both. The eating of rich food in greater quantities than can be 
assimilated and eliminated, produces thick, sluggish blood, which 
tends to deposit sediment at every twist and turn of veins and 
arteries, thus choking the flow. When a stream gets into this 
condition navigation has to be abandoned until the stream is 
dredged out again. When the human body is so choked and 
clogged with stagnant matter inflammation, fermentation, sets in, 
a “sick spell” occurs and the doctor administers a cathartic to ex¬ 
cite the secretions and dredge out the festering debris. Then 
the patient “feels better” and free circulation is once more estab¬ 
lished. 

Of course it is not easy to know just how to regulate the 
supply of rich food so that the circulation shall not become 
clogged; at least it is not easy whilst we cling to the habit of eat¬ 
ing three or four square meals a day, whether we feel hungry or 
not; and whilst we tempt appetite with all manner of highly sea¬ 
soned dishes. 

Wild animals have to hunt for their food, which consists of 
but one thing at a meal. They work for all they get. Unless 
hungry they do not hunt. No one calls a catamount or an eagle 
to highly seasoned feasts at regular intervals. Catamount or 
eagle eats when he is hungry. And before eating he has to wake 
up and work for his dinner. This induces full breathing and sets 
his blood to racing at such a rate that it clears the track and 
leaves room and power enough to take care of the new meal. 
No sluggish circulation in wild animals, and no disease. 

40 



JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


41 


Here is a hint for man. Of course if you are never sick or 
depressed; if you are strong and well, and growing stronger, 
you may need no hints. But if you are not all that you desire 
to be just try a little judicious starving, along with plenty of ex¬ 
ercise and fresh air. Live on plain foods, principally fruits and 
nuts, and skip a meal now and then, or even half a dozen meals, 
until you get down through that veneer of cultivated appetite—• 
down to real hunger, of the sort that impels a catamount to 
travel for miles and wait patiently for hours to find that for which 
he hungers. 

Hunger is an infallible guide as to what to eat, and how 
often. It is the real voice which comes up from arteries 
cleansed and ready to carry fresh supply to waiting body. 

But appetite is the whining call of an unrested stomach and 
unready arteries, which have been taught to cry at stated in¬ 
tervals. 

Most of us are the slaves of spoiled appetite; but we have 
never once in our stuffed lives since childhood been really hun¬ 
gry and known the real joy of eating. 

Clogging of the arteries and veins results in clogging brain 
and nerves. It is impossible for a man with a clogged and dis¬ 
eased body to think his best. The clogging presses against nerves 
as well as arteries, and prevents free circulation of thought. 

And only free thought is high thought. 

A man with a clogged system will think cramped, negative 
thoughts. He can’t help it. His nerves are cramped. His doc¬ 
tor may say he is “nervous,” but “nervousness” and “weak 
nerves” are simply cramped nerves—cramped in a clogged sys¬ 
tem. 

Now I know that it is quite possible to take the kinks out of 
one’s nerves by mind power alone— provided one is not too badly 
clogged and cramped. But high living will eventually choke off 
high thinking, and no human being can reach his highest think¬ 
ing along with high living. Reason and all human experience 
proves this. 

And I leave it to you if it is not vastly more sensible to re¬ 
duce your living and thus free your cramped nerves to the free 
flow of high thought than to attempt to live high and force high 


42 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


thought through “weak nerves.” The only bit of you which 
may refuse to agree with this statement of the case is your spoiled 
appetite. Are you going to pamper that 4nd starve your high 
thought? It is for you to decide. 

But now let us suppose that with your whole being you will 
serve the God of High Thinking. You are going to practice 
low living that you may more fully serve the God of High 
Thinking. You are fasting your body into an unclogged 
state. You are feeding it upon simple foods, such as 
nuts and fruits, which are not thickening to the blood, as are 
meat, condiments and pastries. You are exercising freely and 
taking deep, full, outdoor breathing exercises to promote good 
circulation of blood and free the nerves. You are doing all 
this, and you are rejoicing in the glorious feeling of health and 
courage and freedom which comes to you. You are bright, alert, 
ready, with “a heart for any fate.” 

But you want yet higher thinking. Good! Your nerves are 
free now, and ready to receive higher thought than any they 
have ever carried. 

Now fill them with (( incessant affirmatives” of your highest 
ideals. “Go into the silence” and see how still you can be, men¬ 
tally and physically. Simply rest until Spirit can form . within you 
the mental picture of what you are to zvork for. Keep being 
still, and waiting expectantly, until “it comes to you” just what 
to do. 

To that clean body and brain of yours it will come quickly and 
with joy. 

Keep free in body, and keep looking mentally for new things 
to “come to you,” and the way will grow brighter and brighter. 
You will grow brighter and brighter and brighter. And what¬ 
soever things you desire you shall have. 

Say “I can and I zvill” It will fill you with power. 

Above all things, say “I am what I desire to be.” It is true. 
You have made conscious connection with The Infinite. 


CHAPTER X. 


THE LIMITLESS SELF. 

“Who are you?” 

“Who? Me? Who am I? Why, I am the man who was 
five times elected the mayor of Podunk. That’s who I am.” 

“And who are you ?” I asked a rather ragged looking woman. 

“Oh, I am the wash-lady,” she answers. 

“I am a sales-girl in the big department store across the street,” 
says another. 

I asked a little child, “Who are you?” and it answered, “Who 
am If Why, why, Pm just me” 

“Well, but what is me?” And he looks puzzled, and up and 
down, and gives it up. But he is sure he is me and nobody else. 

The five-times elected man has crystallized into a mayor; the 
woman who does washing has crystallized as a washing machine; 
the sales-girl has settled into a mere part of the great selling- 
machine across the street. 

Only the child knows that me is undefined, undefinable, un¬ 
confined, limitless. 

But he doesn’t know that he knows it. Consequently as he 
grows up he becomes so interested in what he has done that he 
thinks it is himself. He has grown legs and arms, a teacupful of 
brains, a little knowledge and a reputation, and when you ask him 
who he is, he thinks of himself as a mixture of legs, arms, brains, 
doings and reputation. He is limited in his own estimation by 
what he has done. He remembers it all. Every time he says “I” 
he sees a panorama of things he has done, or has failed to do. 
He is little or great, a failure or a success, according to his de¬ 
preciation or appreciation of what he has done. 

The child has forgotten his past. When he says “I” he defines 
nothing. He sees simply a rosy nebulous mist ^out of which 
worlds and other wonders may be formed. There is to him 
nothing formed and fixed. He is a glorious and untraynmeled 


44 JOY PHILOSOPHY. 

Reality and all things are possible. He is full of the joy of power 
and prospect. 

“Of such is the kingdom of heaven,” and “except you become 
as a little child” you shall remain forever imprisoned by what 
you have done and left undone. This kind of prison is hell, where 
one grows not “in wisdom and in knowledge,” but in hate — 
hate for himself and his “life.” And his prison walls keep press¬ 
ing in and in, and by and by they are simply the walls of a coffin. 

And it is all so needless. One only needs to forget, to be again 
a child in the rosy mist of glorious possibilities. 

Forgetting is so easy, too. It is only a matter of displacing 
one picture with another, just as one paints a new picture right 
over the old one on a canvas. As the new one appears the old one 
vanishes. 

Ah, it is easier than that. Memory is just the original stere- 
opticon show, where the old picture fades as the new appears. 
Change the slide and presto the old has vanished from view. 
Keep on slipping in new slides and by and by the old one will 
find its way into the ash barrel, and the ash barrel will be dumped 
into the bottomless pit of oblivion. Oh, it is easy to forget by 
putting in new slides. 

It is our memories which limit us. If we didn’t die once in a 
while and forget, we would surely curl up into something too in¬ 
significant to mention. As long as we persist in piling up our 
doings and misdoings in a great burden of memories we shall 
continue to be borne down by them to earth and the grave. 

As long as we clutter up “memory’s walls” with back-number 
pictures of ourselves and our powers we shall need to call in 
Death, the Junk Man, to renovate for us. 

But we are learning—by and by we will get waked up to the 
desirability of keeping “memory’s walls” freshly decorated with 
new and up-to-date conceptions. This thing of hanging on to 
old things simply because they are old is not only silly but it is 
death-dealing. 

Our mental pictures are the source of our inspiration and 
power, or of our lack of inspiration and power, all according to 
the style of pictures we entertain. There is no power or inspira¬ 
tion or wisdom to be got out of things that are past. He who 



JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


45 


dwells upon fleeting things runs on with the water after it has 
passed the mill-wheel—on and on down the stream and out into 
the ocean, accomplishing nothing. The wise man stays by the 
mill and looks for more water to turn his wheel. If water fails 
he conjures steam or electricity—always something new. Always 
he looks ahead, not behind, for his power. 

Why don’t we do that? When all things are failing us why 
do we think of the time when we used to have water to turn our 
wheel? Why do we look down stream at the water that is past? 
What good will that water do us now? And does not the think¬ 
ing of it simply fill us with despair and paralyze effort and com¬ 
mon sense? Of course. 

There is plenty more power where that flying water came 
from. Look up stream, not down; and be ready. 

Your mental pictures are your only surce of power and wis¬ 
dom. Your continued growth in wisdom and power depends 
upon your development as a mental artist. And that depends 
wholly upon quiet, wide-awake persistence. 

Have you held beautiful mental pictures and worked faithful¬ 
ly to put them on life’s canvas? And did you fail? Well, what 
of it? There is more canvas ready. You have learned by your 
mistakes. Now wipe off everything and take a new mental pic¬ 
ture. Get away from the old one. Begin as if this were your 
very first attempt in all the world. 

Relax your physical efforts for a time. Get limp all over and 
let a new mental picture form. It will be a better work of art 
than the last one—it will be nearer true to principle. We learn to 
make true mental pictures by making them. We learn by every 
one we make, even though the picture itself is smashed. 

And by and by we learn to make such mental pictures as can 
be worked out without a mistake. 

Success lies all in keeping at it. Faith and work will accom¬ 
plish anything you can picture mentally. 

When you cannot work a thing out just as you picture it, it 
is because you have not looked carefully enough at your picture. 

If an artist keeps his eyes too steadily fixed upon the canvas 
where he is working out his picture he never makes a good pic¬ 
ture. He looks at his model, looks long and with joy. As he 


46 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


looks he sees something new. Then quickly, lightly, with as few 
motions as possible he reproduces what he saw in the model. 
If he is not quite satisfied with his reproduction he looks at his 
model again, and keeps looking until it comes to him just how to 
get the effect he is after. Then a few more quick, light strokes 
and success is his. This is what the wise artist does. The fool¬ 
ish one keeps looking at his canvas, to see where his mistake lies; 
his eye is filled by his imperfect work. The wise artist fills his 
eye with the perfect model. The unwise artist, seeing only mis¬ 
takes, is discouraged and incapacitated; while the wise artist 
feasts upon the perfections of his model, and is inspired to try, 
try again until he hits it just right. 


CHAPTER XI. 


IDEALS. 

You and I are artists. But we are prone to look too long and 
often at our canvas—the results of our efforts; and too little at 
our Ideals, which are the sources of all effort and power of ac¬ 
complishment. 

Let us take special times every day for gazing upon our mod¬ 
els—our Ideals. The first thing in the morning and the last 
thing at night should be daily given to special gazing upon what 
we desire. Then many times a day we should pause in our ef¬ 
forts, for a few moments’ study of the Ideal. 

Choose for these sittings the same hour, the same place, and 
even the same chair facing the same way. Let the chair be an 
easy one, but with a straight back. 

Keep your appointments with your Ideal to the minute as 
nearly as possible. But if at any time you are unavoidably 
hindered take the earliest moment possible. 

And remember always that the matter of first importance is 
to keep sweet. To let a change upset you simply necessitates 
extra time and effort to get settled again. 

Sit bolt upright, resting against the back of your chair, and 
in an easy position. Keep absolutely still, with eyes resting (not 
fixed) always on the same spot, straight ahead and slightly above 
the level. Do not get into a rigid state, but see that you are still. 
Aim not to move once during the entire sitting, which should be 
about half an hour long. Perhaps less to begin with. 

Now having disposed of your body rise mentally to the highest 
heights you can picture. For instance, take your highest busi¬ 
ness ideals; picture it in rosy colors and definite outline. Stretch 
it. Make your ideal just as large and fine as possible. 

Picture out the details as plainly as possible. Make it defi¬ 
nite. Decide just what you mean to work for and to realize. 
Let us suppose that you are a married man with a family of 

47 


48 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


small children whom you wish to educate. You don’t want just 
barely enough to send them to college on, leaving yourself a 
broken down and poverty stricken slave in the end. Neither do 
you want to remain a hack worker in a mean position and have 
somebody die and give you money to school your children with— 
whilst you keep on doing hack work. You want to be a man, 
so valuable to the world that you can command plenty of money 
as your right. You want to grow in wisdom and knowledge 
until a more remunerative work will call you and be glad to pay 
for you. You want, say $5,000 a year, to come easily to you as a 
result of your own good and enjoyed effort. Then you can hold 
your head up and enjoy looking any man in the eyes— kindly, as 
a brother and equal. Then you will enjoy sitting straight and 
being still and happy. 

Keep filling in the details of your Ideal and get just as en¬ 
thused over it as you possibly can. But keep your muscles re¬ 
laxed. Rise above the body and revel in your Ideal. 

There is a reason for this;—when muscles are relaxed they 
are in condition to be filled with power from the Ideal held. 
Tensed muscles keep out the mental energy. Mind is positive 
to muscle, and relaxed muscles are receptive to mental power. 

So loose the body and get enthused over the Ideal. Let your 
mental picture wake as much emotion as possible; for emotion is 
real creative force, and creates after the pattern held in mind. 
If you hold a fearful picture in mind emotion creates it. Job said 
“I feared a great fear and it came upon me.” If you hold a 
beautiful picture emotion creates that. Fear and joy, and all 
intermediate shades of feeling, are the same force —the soul- 
force out of which all creation is made. 

So I tell you to do your best to get enthused and exalted over 
your Ideal. Keep telling yourself that your Ideal is you, and 
that in due time you will prove it in terms of matter. If it is 
not you what is it? Your Ideal exists within you, does it not? 
And therefore it muh be you. And your poverty) or your work, 
your “conditions,” exist outside of you, do they not? Then they 
are not you. What exists within is you. 

Of course your “conditions” have their mental pictures 
within you too,— pictures which preceded the conditions them- 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


49 


selves. In past years, perhaps in past ages, you have held with 
emotion the mental pictures of these very conditions. Hence 
their creation. But these pictures have grown old, as people 
grow old, and are ready to be laid away and dissolved in ashes. 
Every single day and hour you are dwelling with emotion upon 
more mental pictures which are to take their place, both inside 
of you and out. So I bid you take special hours for holding 
with enthusiasm the sort of pictures you want to create; instead 
of letting your mind perpetuate the same old things over again. 
And I bid you put into this Ideal picturing all the emotion you 
can summon, to the end that you the more quickly and vitally 
create what you want. 

Qf course this is not at first easy to do. Conditions will come 
in between you and your Ideal—conditions which arouse fear; 
which is emotion, remember—your creative energy. Your emotion 
has habitually gone out to conditions, recreating them. And 
when you picture your Ideal it seems cold, dead and unreal. 

But here is another place where practice makes perfect. Re¬ 
peated efforts will soon switch emotion into new channels, per¬ 
mitting the old mental pictures to shrivel. And conditions will 
follow. 

And the more regular the efforts the more quickly will energy 
acquire the habit of flowing in the new directions. There is 
enormous power in rhythm of effort. One soon gets into the 
swing of a new thought and it fairly does itself. By rhythmic ef¬ 
fort one soon creates through the Ideal a heart-throb. The Ideal 
passes the period of gestation and comes forth into the actual. 

Make light of the actual. Do not permit it to play upon your 
emotions. But exalt the Ideal. Glorify it. Accord it all power. 
Rejoice in it and give it your most lQving thought. Return to 
it at regular intervals, and always enthuse over it. To yourself. 

As to other people, keep mum. Many a man’s Ideal is still¬ 
born because he wastes his energy in talk; and because he draws 
to himself the opposition or contempt of others. Be still; make 
no noise, except when there is something to be gained by it. 
Noises of all sorts use up your mental energy. In stillness power 
is generated. Be still. 

After a few days of faithful practice at gazing upon your Ideal 


50 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


you will find your whole life changing. You will find yourself 
with more heart for your work, and things will seem easier to 
do. Depressions will grow less frequent and less profound, and 
in time they will entirely cease, and you will find new ideas com¬ 
ing to you about how to do your work. Then your interest in 
it will increase and you will begin to know the joy of the success¬ 
ful artist. 

When you arrive at this stage you will wake some morning 
to find yourself making more money. And you will find yourself 
with a little real faith, or conviction, that in due time your Ideal 
will become real. After that all is easy—your Ideal will live you, 
instead of having to be carefully nurtured at stated intervals. 

Between the times when you gaze specially upon your Ideal 
it is well to forget it as fully as possible. Put your best thought 
into your work. But never neglect your stated seasons with your 
Ideal. 

All life is growth, and a live Ideal is no exception. Let it 
grow. Stretch your imagination to take in all you can. When 
you find yourself approaching the $5,ooo-a-year mark you have 
set for yourself you will find yourself wanting $10,000. Now 
don’t accuse yourself of never being satisfied. Just rejoice in 
this evidence of spiritual growth, enlarge your operations and go 
in to win on a larger scale. 

When you have got your children well educated don’t stag¬ 
nate. Look within and find another Ideal to work for. 

Your Ideals are God-given for use. Look eagerly upon them 
and know that they are Life. 

You do not make your Ideals; they make you —if you keep 
mentally in touch with them. 


CHAPTER XII. 


“i CAN AND I WILL.” 

The effectiveness of “I can and I will” as a statement to live 
by depends upon the manner in which you say it. 

To say “I can and I will” through gritted teeth and with 
clenched fists is to defeat the very object you aim for. To as¬ 
sume a prize-fighter attitude toward life is to invite a licking. 

And yet it will not do to say “l can and I will” in a limp, 
half-hearted fashion. 

The right manner, which means the effective manner, of ut¬ 
tering this potent phrase depends upon a correct knowledge of 
the meaning of “I.” “I can and I will” may be the truth or a 
lie, just according as you define “I.” 

For instance, a foolish man who happened to be mayor of 
Minneapolis said to himself, “1 can and I will make a lot of 
money for myself out of the criminals of this city.” There were 
others who said the same thing. That mayor reckoned the “I” 
simply as so much personal cuteness pitted against the city. He 
gritted his teeth and pulled in all the money in sight. He pitted 
himself against the city, which rose up and placed him behind 
prison bars. He may still be gritting his teeth and saying, “I 
can and I will get out of here.” He may be able to get out of 
those particular prison walls, but all the world will be to him a 
prison. He will have to skulk and hide—he is not free. The 
money he took was never his and he knew it. And he could not 
keep it, though he said mightily “I can and I will.” 

You see, “I” to that mayor meant a small something bounded 
by a skin, a suit of clothes, a hat and a pair of shoes. The rest 
of the city, and the world, and the universe at large, seen and 
unseen, had no part in the “I” he placed before “can and will.” 

The undefeatable “I” has no such puny boundaries. It fills 
all space and expresses through all personalities. It is one and 
never goes back on itself. Sooner or later—generally sooner—it 
punishes fully every puny rebel who rises against it. 

61 


52 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


In other words, a man must consider all creation and uncre¬ 
ation when he says “I.” If he fails to do this his success is but 
a transitory imitation and his down-fall sure, as in the case of 
Minneapolis boodlers. 

It is a foolish and short-sighted business policy which ignores 
the Golden Rule. 

To do unto others that which you would not like done unto 
yourself is to bite off your nose in order to leave more blood for 
the rest of your face. 

All life is One, and the good of all is the good of each one; 
the hurt of one is the injury of all. 

When a man realizes this his personal I has expanded and 
merged in the “I” of omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence 
which really “can and will” do things. He has found the Sub¬ 
lime Self which cannot be denied. Instead of gritting his teeth 
and driving ahead against the will of the Whole he identifies him¬ 
self with the Whole. He works with All and All with him. The 
entire universe backs him. 

Clench your hands and say “I can and I will” several times 
in succession through closed teeth. Note how you force all the 
breath out of your lungs as you repeat it, and how exhausted you 
feel by the effort. Why ? Because you shut yourself off from the 
source of breath and will-power. You tried to act and will from 
the little skin-bounded “I.” The result is that your skin-bounded 
self is quickly exhausted of the power it had— had from where? 
From the All. 

Now straighten up and stand like a young god. Look up¬ 
ward and imagine yourself possessed of all power in heaven and 
in earth. Imagine that all the world and the starry hosts are 
waiting alert and with shining eyes, to do your bidding. Imagine 
that you are to touch the button now and instantly they will 
spring to do the rest. The instant you say “I can and I will” 
the entire powers of the universe are to be set in motion. Ah, 
your eyes shine and your whole form expands with gladness, you 
unconsciously take a full breath and “I can and I will” rings 
forth in its full harmony. You are filled with joy and a sense 
of full power. You feel that you “can and will,” and that it will 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


53 


take no clenched muscles, gritted teeth and brute will to accom¬ 
plish, for all creation will back you. 

Will is not a matter of straining muscles and set jaw, but of 
quiet, firm recognition of your oneness with all creation, and 
of creation’s readiness to further your cause. 

The most effective practice for the cultivation of will is that 
of dwelling mentally upon the Sublime Self. Go away by your¬ 
self for a half hour or more and simply remember, and try to 
feel, this unity of the personal self with the Sublime Self. Do 
not try to argue yourself into believing and understanding how 
it can be so; simply relax your muscles, lift up your soul and 
try to feel as if it were so. 

At first you will see little result, except that you feel more 
quiet than has been usual with you. You will be less easily and 
frequently upset, and recover more quickly. Rejoice in this 
and keep at the recognition exercises. 

Very soon you will find this peace deepening in you, and you 
will find it growing easy to do many things you had considered 
hard. You will find yourself remembering without effort that 
all things are working with you, and that you are free to do as 
you will. 

Keep on with the practice and you will find all the deepest 
desires of your heart growing easy of accomplishment. You see, 
you are making sure your connection with the All-Self. Instead 
of having to do things all by yourself as you used to, you have 
opened the sluice for the Sublime Will to flow into and work 
through you for the accomplishment of what you desire. 


CHAPTER XIII. 

DESIRE THE CREATOR. 

Hunger has built the universe. 

Hunger is desire. 

Desire is love. 

Love is God. 

Of course we agree that God built the universe. 

But it was not a God on a great throne outside the universe— 
one at whose behest angels and devils picked up handfuls of 
world-stuff and fashioned things, which were then set running. 

It was God, or desire, in the universe, which has grown it up 
to its present state, and which will keep on growing it through 
all eternity. 

Find desire in your own self—good or bad desire, it is all off 
one piece—find desire in yourself and you find God. Study the 
motions and results of desire in yourself and you will understand 
how God works to create worlds and peoples. 

Note how a desire for food affects you. Does it cause you 
to sit still and sigh? Not until you have first tried every in¬ 
genuity you can think of to gratify your hunger. 

Desire impels you first to effort. 

You go first to all the places where you have been accus¬ 
tomed to find food. We will suppose that you find nothing in 
the pantry, and of course that discovery whets your hunger. You 
again go over all the shelves, hoping to run across something. 
Nothing there. 

Now note that up to this point your hunger has impelled you 
to do just what you have been in the habit of doing. Of course 
this effort has done nothing further than fix a habit of looking in 
certain places for food. 

But now: You have failed to find the food and hunger 
urges you a bit farther. You begin to think. You keep moaning 
inwardly, “Where can I find food?” Your wits grow a little keen- 


54 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


55 


er as hunger sharpens. You begin to think. Mentally you recall all 
the places you have ever heard others speak of as abounding in 
food. Your sharpening hunger impels you to an entirely new 
kind of effort—for you. You go prowling about in search of 
places you have heard others speak of. Your hunger is now 
impelling you to follow race habits of thought. 

But you still fail to find food. Your hunger grows sharper 
and sharper and your wits follow suit. You try everything you 
ever heard of and still no food. There is famine in the land. You 
have exhausted your personal resources and the race resources, 
and still hunger grows and urges you. 

Then at last you begin really to think. Your wits go feeling 
out beyond all the realms you ever heard of before, or they go 
roaming with a new intelligence and questioning over the same 
old ground. Sticks and stones and all sorts of things nobody ever 
dreamed of eating are now with new eyes examined and tested, 
and by and by you discover food and satisfaction where nobody 
ever before dreamed of finding it. At last hunger has made you 
think —it has made you in this particular thing wiser than the 
whole race. It has differentiated you from the rest of your kind. 
It has impelled you to a little higher mark of intelligence than 
has even before been reached. 

Now the rest of your race gazes at you and calls you “so orig¬ 
inal, you know ” And it straightway adopts your new food and 
is differentiated as you are. 

This is the way desire has created the world as it is, and this 
is the way desire is every moment changing it. 

We evolve by the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom. 

Desire impels us to the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom. 

Can you see why a too prosperous nation or individual begins 
immediately to degenerate ? All his hungers being readily grati¬ 
fied his wits are dulled and he ceases to gain intelligence. Soon 
the sameness of that in which he lives grows irksome and he 
loses his desire to live. Disintegration sets in. He is tired of 
the same old thing, even though that thing is beautiful and com¬ 
fortable. 

When a nation or a man gets into this state of satisfied stupor 


56 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


it takes the Goths and Vandals to keep him from dying com¬ 
pletely. 

* It takes necessity to keep evolution going. Or else it takes 
an overweening ambition, which is after all the same thing. 

And underneath and in it all is Desire, the great God, creat¬ 
ing after his own image and likeness. 

The more desire a man has the greater god is he, and the 
faster he evolves consciousness of his god-ship. 

For thousands of years the race has been trying to crush 
out its desire, and the result was a paralyzed and half-dead race, 
with only here and there a live spot. 

The “new thought” is really the thought that desire is God 
and should be encouraged to express. And this new encouraging 
of desire has already resulted in wonderful growth and lengthen¬ 
ing of individual life. 

“Oh,” exclaims the Orthodox One, “how can all desire Be 
good—how can desire be God and yet impel people to such ter¬ 
rible misdeeds—surely there are devil desires as well as God de¬ 
sires.” And yet this same Orthodox One has read many times 
how “God hardened the heart of Pharaoh” to resist God’s own 
commandments about letting “his children go.” 

Now harken: When you found no food in the pantry, and 
none in all the land, and still hunger grew, you went out without 
chart or compass into strange places, and you tried many queer 
things. Some of these things proved bitter and unprofitable and 
you left them and went on and on. And at last you found -the 
New and Good thing. But it was the very same old desire that 
made you try the bitter and unprofitable things, and the New 
and Good thing. You did not try the bitter things 
because you desired bitter things, did you? Of 
course not. All the time you hungered, hungered for the Good 
thing; and kept seeking it; and as soon as you knew the bitter¬ 
ness of the bitter thing you left it and went on, still seeking. 

You see, you were in a Strange Land. You had never been 
that way before. How could you know what was bitter and 
what Good, except by trying them ? Of course there were peo¬ 
ple who told you of the bitterness, but there were still others who 
scoffed at the warning—who told you they had tried it and knew 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


57 


better. And they pointed out to you many personages who used 
the bitter things and yet looked sleek and prosperous. And you 
were hungry, hungry. So you tried the bitter things, and found 
them unsatisfying. And hunger kept urging you until you 
found the New and Good. 

Now was hunger any more “evil” when you tasted the bitter 
things than when you ate of the Good? Of course not. It was 
simply blind, and had to abide by your wisdom. 

It impelled you to try bitter and Good alike, and each trial 
increased your wisdom. 

So is it with the good and evil of this world. The one good 
Dtesire is the life-urge of us all. Whether it urges us to heaven 
or hell it is still good— and it still urges. When in answer to its 
impulse we taste the bitter we learn the lesson and go on. When 
we find the good we return to it again and again. 

But whatever we taste we are taught something; and that is 
what all Desire urges us to— to learn. 

In answer to the impulse of desire we grow in wisdom and 
knowledge— the only growth there is. 

This Desire-God which works in us to will and to do of 
its good pleasure, is a good God. It must be as good in me as 
in you; as good in the worst sinner as in the sweetest saint. The 
only difference between saint and sinner is a difference in wisdom, 
not in desire. 

Since desire urges us to grow in wisdom and knowledge it is 
evidently only a question of time when we shall all know enough 
to turn from the bitter and find the New and Good. Is not the 
One Desire urging us irresistibly on for its own satisfaction? 
God in us, not only the hope of glory, but the absolute certainty of 
success. 


CHAPTER XIV. 


DESIRE AND DUTY. 

Desire has urged us so long and so hard. We have persis¬ 
tently cuffed it into the corner and gone after new gods. 

But despised Desire, deprived of its surface expression, has 
sunk deeper and deeper into our souls and refused to be com¬ 
forted. After trying everywhere else for satisfaction, for a god 
to guide us, we have come back again to poor neglected Desire. In 
our extremity we see Desire with new eyes: we begin to think, 
and to understand. We try to coax Desire out of the corner and 
make peace with it. “The stone that the builders rejected” has 
become “the chief of the corner.” 

The only way to find peace is to follow desire. Desire is the 
only guide to heaven, and the road lies through hell. Worse 
yet, it trails a labyrinthine way over the dead-levels of indiffer¬ 
ence, where Duty lies in wait to nip its every expression. 

Sometime you will grow to hate the 'dead-levels where Duty 
stalks. You will wake to the duty of being undutiful; to the de¬ 
sirability of following desire to the mountain-tops. You will look 
at desire with new respect and ask it to lead you up and out of 
hell and the dead-levels. 

Hell comes before the dead-levels, you know, and all on the 
road to Transfiguration Mount. And when you begin to want 
desire to guide you you will have been a long time on the dead- 
levels. 

Then desire will whisper to you that she is God and you 
want to follow her. 

And when you agree she will begin by leading you straight 
away from Duty. 

Many, many times your faith will not stand the test—you will 
turn back again from following desire. You will turn to duty 
because you are afraid to leave her. 

Well, never mind; caution and conscience are good things 
and easily taught. Follow Duty when you must. 

58 




JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


59 


But keep your eye on desire and follow her every time you 
dare. “Lay for” desire and make haste to follow her every time 
you can. Keep in mind that desire is God. Keep watching and 
she will prove it. When you just must follow Duty, do it; but 
tell yourself it is desire you are following— not Duty. You 
are doing your duty, not because you must, but because you de¬ 
sire to. Always remember this. Never humor Duty to the ex¬ 
tent of letting her think she is making you do things for her 
sake. 

Let me whisper something to you: Duty is a sham. She is 
a hollow mockery. She wears a dignified demeanor to cover her 
real nature. Duty is desire in a goggle-eyed domino zvhich 
scares you stiff. Just you follow desire and never, never give 
Duty the satisfaction of thinking you’d follow her, and by and by 
she will get tired of masquerading. She will take off her mask 
and you will smile to see that she really was desire all the time, 
and you knew her not. 

You see, you and other folks had such a habit of cuffing de¬ 
sire into the corner every time she tried to lead you, that slie 
had to go and cover herself up in order to get you to follow her 
at all. So all along on those horrid dead-levels where you 
thought Duty was leading you such a stupid and righteous chase, 
you were really following desire all the time. 

Now if you will keep telling Duty to her face that you know 
she is only desire—that you are following desire and not Duty; 
if you will keep resolutely • sticking to it Dluty will soon give 
it up and take off her mask, and you will really see the smiling 
face of desire where you thought there was only stern-eyed 
Duty. 

I write Duty with a capital D because that is the way we 
have always thought of her. But desire has always been just 
plain desire to us—something naturally and loveably wicked 
and familiar; so familiar that we bred contempt for her. But 
our eyes are opening. 

Do you remember that when you say “must” to the children 
they straightway are “willful.” Children are true to God, to de¬ 
sire—“of such is the kingdom of heaven.” When you dress 
desire up as a goggly-eyed scarecrow Duty, the child will none 


6 o 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


of it. He might have been just on the point of following desire 
into the very thing you desire him to do, but one sight of Duty 
is enough—he won’t go a step. 

And you call him stubborn, contrary, bad. You are mis¬ 
taken. He is only true to God. And until you become like unto 
him you cannot enter the kingdom of eternal youth and joy 
and godliness. 

Practise doing as you desire, to the end that you may desire 
to do as you will. You cannot go far astray, for in your real 
essence you are the Good God, who cannot go back on himself. 

Duty is a fetish of the conscious or objective mind, whose 
processes comprise only about five per cent of all your thinking. 
The other 95 per cent mind is subconscious and is true to desire. 

Desire is the drawing power of 95 per cent of you ; will is 
the drawing power of only 5 per cent of you. Then do you 
wonder that desire often governs you in spite of your little will 
to follow Duty? 

Your little .5 per cent thinker has conjured up Duty as a 
guide, whilst your 95 per cent mind sticks to desire. You are 
two-minded, at war with yourself. 

Unmask Duty and you will find yourself one and invincible. 
The 5-per-cent tail will lose his job of wagging the 95-per-cent 
dog, and you will reach Transfiguration Mount. 


CHAPTER XV. 

GOD AND DEVIL. 

“You seem to think God put all our desires in our hearts. 
What if we have desires to do things we know are not right, 
and the doing of which will hurt some one’s feelings? I do not 
believe ignorance is the only cause of sinning. We do things 
we know are wrong.” C. B. 

If “God is All,” where can a desire come from if not from 
God? There is no thinker but the One Great Thinker you call 
“God.” All creation is made up of God’s trains of thought. The 
real, informing, thinking self of all beings is that same One 
Thinker. He (or It) is working through all ages to think out 
the justice, love, wisdom that is in Him. He weighs one side 
of a thing through me, and another through you; and He waits 
patiently until He can figure it all out and arrive at the meeting 
place of truth. 

Just as in your individual mind you seem to weigh and 
reason first one side and then another, so the One Thinker weighs 
and reasons all sides of The Truth through all people. 

Sometimes you are inclined to think one thing is right, and 
then you change your mind and go over to the other side. So 
the One Thinker seems to change His mind and go from one 
side to another. 

He first decides that the Israelites shall go; then He thinks 
through Pharaoh and says they shall not. Then He thinks still 
louder through Moses and they start. Then He sees Pharaoh’s 
side again and “hardens Pharaoh’s heart” (that is just what the 
Bible record says), and tries again to hold them. Then inch by 
inch He fights over the two sides in His mind (there isn't any 
place but God’s mind, and we are all in it) until he finds the 
point of perfect justice, or equity. 

The same One Thinker, or God, has debated within Himself 
as to whether the Filipinos shall go free or belong to the United 

61 


62 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


States. You thought the people of the United States and the 
legislators in particular were doing all that thinking and talking 
for and against. Why, bless you heart, the people and the legis¬ 
lators are dummies in God's mind —they are little thoughts 
moving around in the mind of the One Thinker—thought through 
which He weighs and balances and decides the equities. He 
thinks out and proves His intuitions in this way. 

Now don’t all of you anti-expansionists jump up and screech 
at me that it is not equity that we should own the Philippines. 
You are only one side of the debate. 

And don’t all you expansionists come smiling around to pat 
me on the back. You are only the other side of the question. 

I AM on the fence and I can see you both. All keep still now 
and I will whisper to you a secret: God hasn't thought it all out 
yet. He is still thinking alternately on one side and then on the 
other. It is nip and tuck with him whether to hold the Filipinos 
or to let ’em go. But He thinks He’ll let ’em go— when he finds 
a way. He’s thinking it out through you and me and Governor 
Taft and President Roosevelt and the rest. 

There is just One Mind, which fills space full. All minds are 
inlets of the One Mind. All thoughts are thoughts of the One 
Mind. 

Desire is the will of the One Mind. All desires are inlets 
of the one desire or will. All desires are of God. They are God’s 
desires, fitting in with that particular train of thought. As the 
thought changes so will the desires. God’s thoughts and desires 
change through all eternity. His desires fit the particular train 
of thought He is working out—one thing in you, another in 
me; changing in each of us from day to day; but always God. 

God is proving through you and me what is right and what is 
wrong; what is just and what is unjust. 

Wrong ALWAYS brings unhappiness; right ALWAYS 
brings happiness. 

It is not enough that you have been told that it is “wrong” 
to tell lies. God hardens your heart to tell lies and suffer for it 
until you have so thoroughly proved the wrong and unhappiness 
of lying that NOTHING could tempt you to lie. So with all 
other wrongdoings. 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


63 

But lots of times we think things are wrong when they are 
not really so. We have been told things are wrong—we do not 
know for ourselves. God “tempts” us to prove things. 

The gaining of wisdom is all we are here for —here in God’s 
mind. We learn, and God proves, as much by our wrong deeds 
as by our right ones. By lying and suffering for it we learn 
first to wish for truth, then to work to gain it; then finally we- 
love it and live it. 

But not all in one little span of life perhaps. That is the 
trouble with people who are so greatly worried over right and 
wrong—their noses are always to earth and a death makes them 
lose the trail. They see a single being in one short span of life; 
instead of looking up and taking all life and all lives as a Whole. 

But they, too, are learning. 


CHAPTER XVI. 


LET US PLAY. 

Except you become as a little child you shall in no wise 
be able to “concentrate.” Concentration is the natural mental 
attitude of a child. 

A child is one-minded. When its attention turns to any given 
object its whole being is polarized to that object. To all intents 
and purposes there is nothing in existence beyond the one thing 
to which the child’s attention is turned. 

Did you ever notice a fine horse when its attention is turned 
toward something? He “pricks up his ears” and they point di¬ 
rectly at the thing that has attraced his attention. Every cell in 
a child’s body, and every atom in his soul, “pricks up its ears” at 
the thing his attention is attracted to. Every cell and atom re¬ 
ceives clear impress of the thing attended to. This is “polariza¬ 
tion,” or concentration. This is the secret of the child’s marvel¬ 
lous aptitude for learning. It is likewise the secret of good mem¬ 
ory and the joy of living. 

But the child forgets the art of polarized attention as he 
grows up. The main cause for losing the art is lack of gump¬ 
tion in parents and teachers. The child is charged with “musts” 
and “don’ts” to which he is compelled to pay attention. Every 
little cell is made to carry such burdens that it simply has not the 
heart to “prick up its ears” and take in a new impression. Only 
here and there is found anything vital enough to polarize atten¬ 
tion. 

Burden-bearing is the great cause of lack of concentration, 
lack of ease in learning, lack of memory and of joy of living. 

If we were a bit wiser life would be a continual playground, 
where we’d simply grove in wisdom and knowledge and self-use 
by having a good time at our games. 

When we must play there is no joy in it. We must play the 
business game and support our families. We must “keep up ap¬ 
pearances.” We must do as others do. We must —we must. 

64 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


65 


Nonsense! The only must there is about it all is the one we 
took from our parents and teachers and the traditions of men. 
We are hypnotized to think we must. 

And it’s all a lie, too. Suppose you try it once and see. Sup¬ 
pose you sit down and say you will not . * Who is to compel you ? 
Nobody. You have heard of women who took to 
their beds and staid there—out of pure lack of 
anything else to attract the attention they wanted. They could 
have walked if they would—as circumstances proved—but they 
wouldn't. They went to bed. And somebody or other always 
met the compulsion and took care of them. They refused to 
even take care of themselves; they slid the “must” off themselves. 
And there was always somebody else ready to assume the “must” 

That is it— we assume our own burdens. The less vigorous 
and determined and wise we are the more of these burdens we 
assume— burdens dropped by others. 

And what good does it do to bear burdens? None—worse 
than none. The woman who dropped hers and went to bed sinr 
ply stagnates and atrophies for lack of activity; and the woman 
who assumes the burden of walking and thinking for her wears 
herself out for nothing at all. If she had walked out and left 
the woman in bed that woman would have got up again and 
walked and thought for herself. 

All our burden-bearings are as utterly foolish and unavailing 
as that. I have before me letters from two women who are still 
toting their sons around, although the sons are past the thirty 
mile-stone, and do not even take the trouble to let their mothers 
know their whereabouts. If those mothers had dropped thosd 
boys years ago and made the most of life for themselves they 
would be now such bright, handsome attractive women that they 
couldn't keep their sons away from them. 

The burden-bearing woman (or man) tires herself so with 
useless efforts of mind and body that she has not energy enough 
left to keep herself in even decent trim. She gets bedraggled 
and falls away back to the tail end of the world’s never-pausing 
procession. 

Women as a class do not think and command themselves to 
best advantage. They are content to shoulder any ©Id burden 


66 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


they see slipping from the shoulders of another, and to spend days 
and energy in feeling. Any kind of a feeling will keep the gen¬ 
erality of women from thinking. Women shoulder indiscriminate 
and useless burdens and feel themselves into innoccuous desuetude. 

It is a hardship when one does not learn in childhood to 
read and write. But it is not an irremediable evil. One can 
learn when he is 20 or 40 or 60. A great authority on the Greek 
language learned the language after he was 80. He couldn’t 
have done it though if he had fagged himself with burdens other 
people had dropped. 

It is never too late to drop burdens and use energy to some 
purpose. All one has to do is to declare “I have no burdens— 
life is a play-ground!”—and stick to it. 

You have no burdens—they are all an hallucination. Life is 
a play-ground. This is the truth. Just tell it to yourself until 
it works its way into your semi-paralyzed mind and makes itself 
felt. Relax physically and mentally. Lie idly under the apple 
tree and look up to the blue sky and let fancy play with the 
world. You will find new and happy truth in common things, 
as Newton did. 

Lie there and let truth regenerate you. By and by you will 
think of something you want to go play at. Perhaps the pervad¬ 
ing humor of the world will suggest that you want to make mud- 
pies again. Perhaps it will suggest a blackberry pie instead. It 
is a lot more fun to make blackberry pies than mud ones; and it’s 
such pleasure to watch the other children’s shining eyes whilst 
you all eat. 

Perhaps you will prefer to go play the game of business. 
Well, play that. This whole great play-ground is before you. 
Go play. Make your own choice of games and have a good 
time. 

Somebody says, “Life is real, life is earnest.” But I say unto 
you that “Life is real—ly what you think it.” It is a great 
game, a tragedy, or a sentence at hard labor, just as you will. 
If you don’t like what it has been use your ingenuity to make it 
different. 

Above all things, drop the burdens. Refuse to make bricks 
without straw. If the world won’t let you go just go anyhow. 


(L.oFC. 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


67 


There is always a Red Sea to cut off pursuers and obliterate your 
tracks —unless perchance you dig up your old tracks and lug them 
along through the wilderness. If you do, I give you fair warn¬ 
ing, you’ll never get across the border into the land flowing 
with milk and honey. 

This is a new, glorious day— different from any other day— 
a clean, beautiful day. The Red Sea has wiped out all the old 
days; the new days are not yet born. This is the only day there 
is. Go play in it. 

“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” 
One thing at a time, and that thing done with all thy heart;— 
this is concentration, the secret of Life and Creation itself. And 
it is a simple little thing—so simple that a child does it without 
effort, and any man or woman can acquire it again by practise. 

Remember, that every time you say to yourself, “I must ” 
you tell a lie , and you commit a crime against yourself. You 
lay upon yourself a burden and rob yourself of the joy of 
doing. 

Every time you catch yourself saying, “7 must ” deny it hard. 
Sit down in a chair, relax all over and ask yourself solemnly who 
says you “must.” You said it. You are doing all the compelling. 
Why? Simply because you choose to do this particular thing. 
There is no compulsion about it. You choose to do it—you want 
to do it. You are exercising your divine free will to do it. Oh, 
of course you can say, “If it wasn't for this, that or the other I 
wouldn’t do it.” But that does not alter the fact that you can 
fold your hands and leave it undone if you choose. But you 
desire to do it. You choose to. You want to. 

Keep at this practise of logic until you realize that you have 
thought yourself completely out of the old “must” feelings. 

As you emerge from the “must” feelings you will find the joy 
of life filling you, and you will find memory and other faculties 
regaining the vigor of youth. 

Everything but a mushroom or a toadstool takes time to mani¬ 
fest. You have been growing into the “must” habit since child¬ 
hood. It may take time to outgrow it. But perseverance will 
accomplish it. And the more faithful you are in practice the 


o3 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


more quickly will you realize the freedom, joy, youth you de¬ 
sire. 

The joy of life is here and now. 

Joy of life is the power of accomplishment. 

All things are easily possible to him that believes—and prac¬ 
tices. 

“The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” 


CHAPTER XVII. 


THE OLD-CLOTHES MAN. 

“Some months ago you wrote in a short letter to me, stating 
that when a person leaves this earth, death is only a door to 
another state of life, and that we don’t enter it unless it is best 
for us at that time and place. Do you consider death in all its 
different forms, in a young person as well as old, best for them, 
no matter whether they die from accident or natural causes ? Mr. 
Towne writes in his article on reincarnation in October number 
that what we learn during one life is carried forward into the 
next. Now how much knowledge can a child have learned when 
death comes, compared to an older person? If death is the door 
by which we enter another state, and that is spiritual, what comes 
from that ? Do we inhabit this earth again ? Won’t you and Mr. 
Towne give us a little more light on the subject?” 

When we are children and go to school we work problems 
on a slate—or used to. If we made a little mistake and quickly 
discovered it we wet our forefinger on the tip of our tongue 
and wiped out the mistake, and then we filled its place with the 
correct figure, or figures. But sometimes we made a mistake 
away up near the top of a long problem of long division, and 
that mistake was carried on down until there were more mistaken 
figures than correct ones. Then we wet our little sponge and 
wiped the whole thing out of existence, and did it all over again. 
Sometimes we did this several times over before we learned how 
to do the “sum” correctly. 

We are still doing that sort of thing. Life is really a “prob¬ 
lem,” which must be done by mathematical rule. Our bodies 
are simply the figures on the slate. Every day we work away 
like more or less sensible and happy children; every day we 
find ourselves making and correcting mistakes, wiping off a little 
here and adding a bit there. Our bodies record all this, mind you. 

But sometimes we fail to see our mistakes in time to correct 
them a little at a time, and sometimes we have not the patience 


7o 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


to correct them. The mistakes are carried all through our bodies, 
just as through our problems on a real slate. Then we discover 
what a lot of blunders there are to correct, and we grow dis¬ 
couraged and quit trying. This relaxation of effort and will 
and interest is the wiping off of the slate. We do it ourselves— 
do it sub-consciously, from the habit of ages of wiping off the 
slate. That which goes out of a body at death is the real person, 
and he it was who wiped off the slate, who withdrew himself 
from the body. 

No man dies unless he is ready to die—unless his mistakes 
of thinking (his body is built of his thoughts, you know,) are so 
in preponderance that he cannot hold himself longer as an organ¬ 
ization. 

A body is an organization of thought things which must fit 
in and work together. When a man’s mind is filled with zmrring, 
opposing thoughts, he is disorganizing himself. It is as if he 
turned wolves and lions and dogs all into the same corral, to 
oppose and rend each other, as well as to tear down whatever 
else was therein organized. Lions, wolves and dogs are warring 
organizations. 

A man’s body in order to endure must be one organization,— 
every part must work with every other part. But as long as a 
man thinks into his body, one day good things, kind things; and 
another day ugly, revengeful, death-dealing things, he is turning 
lions and lambs together. And it is only a question of time and 
the kind of thought when he will cease to be an organization,—he 
will fall to pieces, a victim to opposing forces. 

And a man need not even be ugly himself in order to die. 
He needs only recognize ugliness in others. The Pharisee who 
has spent his life in ferreting out meanness and obscurity in 
others is as full of meanness as the nastiest sinner that walks. 
Man becomes what he thinks upon. 

But such a one may be strong and healthy a long time 
because nearly his whole body is organized of the one kind of 
thought. So full is he of “evil” that he is an organized evil—a 
one-mind of evil. 

It is the “good” and the goody-good people who fill them¬ 
selves up on the warring factions of good and evil, whose bodies 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 71 

are choked with the warring and who suffer most and die 
youngest. 

The same thing is true of people at all ages. Wisdom does 
not necessarily come with years, though no soul ever lived five 
minutes that did not in that time discover and eliminate mistakes 
by waking up to more or less truth. All experience enlightens— 
even that of being born to die in a day or a week. 

Don’t imagine babies are such ignorant little lumps. They 
are not. They are wise enough to choose their environment — 
just the one best calculated to teach them what they most need 
to know NOW. To be sure they do not choose parents as you 
and I would go out and look over a stableful of horses and 
choose one. They do better than that. As the birds obey the 
desire to fly south when winter comes down with frosty breath, 
so the infant soul obeys its sub-conscious desire for a particular 
parentage. In other words, parent and child are attracted; and 
each furnishes to the other the particular sort of experience 
necessary to its next further growth. 

Just as we sometimes wiped off our problem before we had 
half a dozen figures down, because we had found our mistake 
and wished to correct our work, so the infant soul may find a 
big mistake and wipe out its body—only to begin again some¬ 
where else. 

Oh, don’t be sceptical because you can’t remember doing such 
things. You cannot remember many things that happened just a 
few years ago. How, then, shall you remember back to the time 
you chose your parents? Or still further back to the infinitely 
greater number of parents you may have chosen in succession, 
since the beginning of eternity. You cannot even remember 
those problems you put on and wiped off your slate at school. 
Is it, then, wonderful that you forget some other things? 

But you can do other problems like those you learned on, and 
do them almost unconsciously , so easy has it become. You 
learned much on those old forgotten “sums”—you remember the 
“how,” but you forget where you learned how. 

So, no wonder you forget your old bodies and experiences. 
But the wisdom gained with them is still with you. 


72 JOY PHILOSOPHY. 

And every hour you are learning new truth—and forgetting 
how you learned it. 

The babe is conscious, and the babe learns—fast, fast. But 
it forgets haw it learned. And if it is not pleased with its 
experience and learning it lets go its body and passes on —to 
other experiences. 

Those who die die because they are ready. And they “are 
taken away from the evil to come .” 

“Accidents” are results of “natural causes.” An “accidental” 
death is a “natural” death—and sometimes much easier, and 
preferable to a so-called “natural” death. Who would not, if left 
to a decision, unbiased by public opinion,—who would not prefer 
instant death in the electric chair to a slow rotting by cancer or 
tuberculosis? One death is as “natural” as another. 

No man dies unless it is best for him to do so. 

“Has anyone supposed it lucky to be born? 

I hasten to tell him it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.” 

There is nothing about death to be afraid of. It is but a 
wiping off of the mistakes which have handicapped you. YOU 
go on forever. 

Death is as natural and as good as life. 

Only the fear of death can harm you, by tearing down your 
body before you want it wiped out. 

It is said the first mark of insanity is that the patient fears 
and hates his best friend. The fear and hatred of death is 
insanity. To fear death for yourself is foolish. It but hypnotizes 
you, and death charms you as a snake charms a bird. You die 
before you would need to if you had not feared death. 

It is still more foolish to fret over the death of another. In 
this case you not only add the death-dealing forces to your own 
body, hastening death for yourself; but your heavy thought 
handicaps in the outset of his new state of existence the friend 
for whom you grieve. 

Spiritualists who claim to see and converse with departed 
souls often tell their friends that the “spirit forms” are “so weak 
and worn” that they are not able as yet to communicate with 
their old friends. The medium says the new made “spirit” is 
“heavy” over the unhappy state of its earth friends. 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


73 


Why should not this be so? If our heavy thoughts ever affect 
each other (and we know they do) then death does not change 
it. Our thoughts carry help or hindrance to those of whom we 
think, be they dead or alive. 

We think we must eat right and live right and think right 
for the sake of our unborn or new-born babes, that they may 
have the best possible start in their new existence. We need 
just as much to eat right and live right, and especially to think 
right, in order to give our “departed friends” the best possible 
start in the new life upon which they are just entering. We need 
to lay aside every small personal consideration, and bid them a 
hearty good-speed with every thought of them. We need to 
cultivate peace, and quiet joy, and willingness to have them 
go, for their sakes. 

We can easily do this if we remember to be glad with them , 
instead of selfishly fussing around our own little personal “loss.” 
They have wiped off the slate and gone on, with added wisdom, 
to better things. Why not be glad with them, and for them? 

Whether we are spiritualists and believe in departed spirits; 
or evolutionists, who believe in an immediate reincarnation; or 
theosophists, who believe in a Devachanic rest before reincar¬ 
nation; or Catholics whose friends may be in purgatory; or 
Protestants who hope they are in heaven,—whatever we are, the 
fact remains that our friends can no more fly beyond the reach 
of our help or hindrance than they can fly beyond our thoughts. 

Let us help those who have “passed out.” Let us treat them 
for power and love and joy and progress. Let us make them 
glad by being glad ourselves. 

Death is good. 

But it will cease to be necessary as we cease to make and 
perpetuate mistakes. 

Being afraid of death and mistakes is the greatest mistake 
of all. 

Get rid of it. Face death in your mind, until it loses all 
terrors for you. Call it good. Tell it if ever the day comes when 
you want to die you will do so with a good grace. Call death 
friend, and not foe. Tell it you may need it some day to wipe 
off your body, but remember that YOU couldn’t die if you 


24 JOY PHILOSOPHY. 

would. Death is only your old-clothes man—you may need him, 
and you may not. 

For my part, I don’t care whether I ever die again or not. 
If I keep on building better and better (and I see no reason why 
I shouldn’t) I shall live right along indefinitely, maybe forever. 

But if ever I get myself into such a tangle as some folks do, 
and as I have got into in times past, I shall do what Jesus did— 
give up my body. 

Ida C. Craddock, sweet, earnest, clean soul, chose, for the 
sake of forcing her teachings upon an unready world, to butt 
her head repeatedly against the stone wall of Law, until she was 
so bruised and discouraged that she—wiped off her slate by con¬ 
scious will. She made the martyr’s choice and mistake, which 
means always death. 

If ever I got tangled up as Ida Craddock did I might end 
the matter as she did—as Socrates ended his troubles. 

But I hope to avoid the paths that lead to death. I love to 
live, and I mean to keep on living more and more fully and posi¬ 
tively. I am seeking FIRST the law of Life and to live it. 

Ida Craddock sought FIRST to convert and reform the 
world. The world, which did not want to be reformed, nor 
even to be taught too fast to reform itself, made things so warm 
for Ida Craddock that she couldn’t stand it. 

It seems a great pity. But it isn’t. Ida chose her own 
course, knowing the result; she has learned her lessons, wiped 
off her mistakes and gone on to do still better work for herself 
and the world. 

Jesus of Nazareth did much as Ida did. He spoke out in 
meeting, and out of it, until he stirred people up to cruicfy 
Him. He wanted to be crucified, in order that He might prove 
that He could live again. 

But I want to live all the time , and I don’t care whether or 
not I prove anything to anybody but myself. 

Jesus and Ida Craddock deliberately trod the road to death. 
According to their faith and work, it was unto them. 

I am treading my own individual path where no death is. , 

Death lies waiting for him who works against the established 
order—who makes crosses and carries them. 


JOY PHILOSOPHY. 


75 


Life lies within and without for him who, resisting nothing, 
grows out of the established order—as a branch from the tree. 

I believe I have found eternal life. Time alone will prove it. 
To live is to love and work with all things, knowing that all 
is good and all is life. 

To resist anything is to cut off so much of life. 

To fear death is to bring it upon you. 

Get busy with LIFE. 


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